


The Curse of Caring

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Accidents, Adventure, F/M, Foreshadowing, Friendship, Humour, Impossible Girl, Past Companions - Freeform, Psychic Paper, Regrets, Romance, Surprise appearances, close to hurt/comfort but not quite, continuity cavalcade, freeform storytelling, lots of series 8 and 9 plot references, no violence, paradoxes, rescuing a loved one, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 18:23:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14478534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: When Clara Oswald receives an urgent distress call from the Doctor via psychic paper, it's up to her to figure out how to reach him on a remote planet. She finds herself relying on some unexpected help that could tear the universe apart.





	1. Distress Call

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in serialized form over the course of a couple of weeks from late April to mid-May 2018. It was my first attempt at doing such a story.
> 
> My usual "concordance" story notes will be posted after the final chapter.
> 
> My thanks once again to [Universe on Her Shoulders](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders/works) for performing a great beta read on this.

_Clara?_

_Clara._

_Help me._

_Help ..._

     **Doctor?**

    …

    …

     ** _DOCTOR?_**

***

Clara Oswald stared at the psychic paper in her hand, willing the Doctor to reply.

The Doctor _never_ called for help. That just wasn’t his thing. Yes, he called her if he desired her _assistance_ —Clara would never forget how he blew up her phone to the tune of 127 missed calls because he wanted her by his side to deal with the Zygon uprising. And, OK, there was that time he’d gotten himself committed to attending a party thrown by King Louis XIV and needed a plus one. And it was a given that at least once a week he’d forget where he left his sonic specs and Clara would have to steer him in the right direction. But this felt … different. It was a true plea for help. She just knew. And the rest of the world suddenly took second place.

“Miss Oswald, are you OK?” Courtney Woods was suddenly standing in front of her desk and Clara jumped; she’d had been so distracted, she never noticed her student approach. The rest of the Year Tens were reading silently out of their copies of _Jane Eyre_ (except for Brian, who had clearly fallen asleep, not that Clara gave a damn at that particular moment), but Courtney had noticed Clara’s face turn ashen as she looked at the small wallet in her hand. Being one of the few who knew the Doctor was more than just the slightly weird substitute caretaker everyone knew Miss Oswald had a crush on, as well as aware the Doctor often transmitted private messages to Clara via a piece of sci-fi paper she always kept with her (sometimes _very_ personal messages, as Courtney once discovered and promised to never let Miss Oswald live down), she knew the Doctor must have sent her teacher some very bad news. “Did someone die?”

“What? No. I … I hope not. I … think I have to leave.” Clara half-made to get up out of her chair. 

“Remember what happened last time,” Courtney warned. A closed office door down the corridor had not completely muffled the dressing-down Mr. Armitage had given Miss Oswald the last time she’d needed to step out of class owing to a “personal crisis.” Every one of her students had expected her to quit that afternoon and it wasn’t until after she went for lunch with “the Caretaker” (which apparently involved a visit to a salon as she came back to class with a different hairstyle than when she’d left) that she’d calmed down enough to finish the day.

“Let me worry about that,” Clara said. “Go back to your desk, Courtney. Keep reading Chapter 5.”

Courtney shrugged and sat back down. Clara rationalised that leaving now would make no sense—because she had no idea where to go, for one thing. It wasn’t as if the Doctor had asked her to swing ’round to where his caravan had stalled off the M1. So, she picked up the psychic paper and tried contacting the Doctor again, willing herself not to speak the words aloud:

     **Where are you, Doctor?**

     **Doctor? Answer me!**

A few moments later, words finally began to appear on the psychic paper; normally bold and black, they were so faint under the bright lights of the classroom, Clara had to turn the paper on an angle to read them.

_Injured._

_Can’t move._

_it’s bad._

_Might regenerate._

     **Don’t you dare!**

     **What happened?**

_Stupid, stupid Doctor._

_Fell._

     **How far?**

_Don’t know…_

_Left my measuring stick at the top_

_of this bloody great cliff!_

_Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap._

_I need tea._

     **Where are you?**

     **I’ll bring you all the tea you need.**

…

…

     **Doctor?**

_Third moon of Quijote._

_Mu Arae system._

_1605 AD. April 26. 9:30 a.m._

_Always loved the book._

_Book is better than the planet._

     **How can I help you?**

_Find me._

     **I get that. How?**

…

     **Doctor, how?**

…

_Black… ___

__…_ _

___Go to the Black… ____ _

____…_ _ _ _

____**Doctor?**_ _ _ _

____…_ _ _ _

____**Doctor!**_ _ _ _

____No reply._ _ _ _

____Clara calmly closed the wallet, her mind racing._ _ _ _

____A wave of panic swept over her. The Doctor, her Doctor, was lying at the bottom of some cliff on an obscure planet a gazillion light years … no, he’d have a fit if she used a word like “gazillion.” Clara quickly called up Wikipedia on her mobile … OK, _fifty_ light years away, all alone. And hurt. Maybe unconscious. Maybe even in the process of changing into a new man as she sat powerlessly at her desk at Coal Hill School in front of a bunch of pudding brains. He’d no longer be the man she fell in…_ _ _ _

____She shook her head. No, stop thinking like that. He said it was 1605 AD where he was at—four hundred and ten years earlier (her _Trivial Pursuit_ answers-memorising mind sparked on the fact he’d, of course, visited Quijote the year the book the planet was named after was published). So, not only did she have space to traverse, but time as well. _ _ _ _

____The last time she had to reach the Doctor across time and space, she had Missy’s help. And, as far as she knew, Missy was still on Skaro. Who could she turn to now?_ _ _ _

____The Doctor’s last message to her was “Go to the Black…” with the Black bit actually capitalised, and she hoped that meant what she thought it meant._ _ _ _

____Clara glanced at the clock. Only about five minutes to go till end of class. The kids are about to get lucky, then. “OK, that’s all for today,” she said to her slightly surprised students. “If you’re quiet and promise not to disturb the other students, _and_ finish Chapter 6 by Monday, I’ll let you get a head start on your weekend, alright?”_ _ _ _

____The students quickly and quietly filed out, except for Brian, who was still asleep, and Courtney, who returned to Clara’s desk._ _ _ _

____“Is he OK?” the student/occasional TARDIS traveller/future President of the United States asked._ _ _ _

____Clara shook her head. “No, he isn’t. He’s hurt and I need to find him.”_ _ _ _

____“I want to help. I’ll never forgive him for hanging you out to dry on the moon, but he’s still my friend and I know he’s your, uh… you know.”_ _ _ _

____Clara managed a smile in reply. Courtney shrugged._ _ _ _

____“Thanks for the offer, Courtney, but I have to do this on my own. I’ll see you Monday, though I might well come back with a few more grey hairs.”_ _ _ _

____Courtney went back to her desk to collect her things, accidentally-on-purpose stepping on Brian’s foot as she went past. The boy woke up with a yelp, gave Clara an embarrassed look that she neither noticed nor cared about, and made a quick exit._ _ _ _

____Courtney was barely out the door herself when Clara was on her mobile. She tapped in a special phone number and, after two rings, heard a series of four quick beeps in lieu of a human response. Then she spoke._ _ _ _

____“Osgood, it’s Clara. But you probably guessed that since I’m the only person on the planet with your phone number. Sorry, I hate people who ramble in voicemails, too. We need to meet. He’s in trouble. Again.”_ _ _ _

____**Next episode: The Black...** _ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone is uncertain, "Quijote" is the original spelling used for Don Quixote and is the spelling used in the name of the real-life exoplanet referenced in this story.


	2. The Black Archive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor is in trouble. Clara needs to get to him. Problem: he's on another planet, four hundred years in the past. But a cryptic part of his message points at a possible solution...

Petronella Osgood sat on a bench looking out towards the Thames in the shadow of the majestic Tower of London, which doubled as both a tourist attraction and as the headquarters of UNIT, a.k.a. the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. She smiled as she heard the roar of a familiar motorcycle pull up on the road behind her.

Point of trivia: there were actually two Petronella Osgoods working for UNIT, one of whom was a cloaked Zygon formerly known as Bonnie, who had attempted to lead an uprising among her people. After being forgiven by the Doctor—and by Clara, whom she had impersonated for a time—Bonnie had become the second Osgood, replacing one who had been killed by Missy some time before. However, as far as UNIT was concerned, there was still only one Osgood (Bonnie did, after all, massacre a large number of UNIT soldiers during her uprising, so forgiveness from the organisation was less likely to be forthcoming). So, as they often did, the two flipped a coin to see which one would rendezvous with Clara at UNIT HQ and help her out.

“Hey, Clara,” Osgood called out as she got off the bench and sauntered towards the young schoolteacher who was sliding her helmet off. She took a moment to straighten the dark, tie-less suit she wore for the occasion.

“Hey, yourself. Nice magician outfit, though his lining is red, not blue,” Clara joked as she gave Osgood a hug. Then she looked her friend over. “So, human or Zygon?”

“Tails,” was all Osgood offered.

“Gotcha.” Clara knew better than to push the issue. She motioned towards the nearby security door. “Let’s walk.”

“What’s happened to the Doctor?”

“He’s hurt, Osgood. Badly. On a planet fifty light years and four hundred years away. That’s all I know, and I need to get to him.”

As Clara recounted the messages she’d received from the Doctor, Osgood led her through the security door and into the bowels of UNIT HQ. They were headed for the ultra-secret Black Archive, a chamber accessible to only a small number of people: the Doctor himself, Osgood, UNIT Chief Scientific Officer Kate Stewart, an additional person the Doctor refused to identify, and Clara. In it were stored many secrets related to the Doctor and his companions. And Clara, for reasons the Doctor declined to divulge, had the distinct privilege of being the only companion ever granted unrestricted access, meaning she was allowed to keep her memories of each visit (most visitors were subjected to voluntary—or involuntary—mind wipes upon leaving).

The pair stopped at an unmarked, black steel door at the end of a featureless hallway, next to a desk that used to be staffed by a guard until it was decided to further reduce the number of people aware of the archive’s existence. Osgood pressed her hand against the middle of the door where a hidden sensor was housed and spoke aloud as a faint yellow outline traced around her fingertips. “Petronella Osgood. Password: Gemini.”

She withdrew her hand, and the door refused to open. This was expected; sensors detected more than one individual, and that person needed to provide their own code.

Clara placed her own hand on the centre of the door and said, “Clara Oswald. Password: Soufflé Girl.”

As the door opened, Osgood cocked an eyebrow. “Still rocking Soufflé Girl?”

“I’m thinking of changing it to ‘Jane Eyre.’ I’m re-reading the book and I realised Mr. Rochester reminded me of somebody.”

“Gee, I wonder Who?”

“You didn’t just capitalise that last word, did you?” Clara laughed as they proceeded into the archive.

If it had been a museum, the main part of the chamber could have been billed “The Doctor Who? Experience,” as it was filled with artifacts, gadgets and ephemera related to the Doctor and his many lives. Some of the material was ancient, and some was recent. (Too recent for comfort, sometimes; Clara recently found a pair of sunglasses she’d left behind during a visit to fifteenth-century Italy that somehow found their way into the Archive after having been passed down through the Medici family by way of Leonardo da Vinci, who’d tried to reverse-engineer the lenses. It had been the second pair of glasses she’d temporally misplaced in so many weeks, earning her a rare, if admittedly deserved, talking-to by the Doctor.)

“OK, Clara, we’re in the Archive,” Osgood said, entering Captain Obvious mode. “Why, exactly? Getting to him without a TARDIS is a bit of an ask, even for us.”

“If the Doctor’s last message meant ‘Black Archive,’ and not a suggestion for a roulette wheel bet or some esoteric _Game of Thrones_ reference, I’m hoping there is something in here I can use to get to him.”

Osgood sniffed. “Unfortunately, try as we might, we’ve never been able to get our hands on another TARDIS. Not that you could fly one, anyway.”

“Oh, really?” Clara replied, imperiously, folding her arms and cocking an eyebrow.

Osgood gaped at her friend. “You’re having me on.”

“He’s been teaching me for years. It’s actually not that difficult. And no, you’re _not_ telling Kate. There’s enough embarrassing stuff in my file already—speaking of which, you better have deleted those texts between me and Danny like I asked, by the way.”

“Clara, some of our greatest minds haven’t been able to figure out how to fly a TARDIS. The Doctor once took Stephen Hawking for a tour as a favour to the Brigadier and Hawking’s first words after he came out were, ‘I haven’t a bloody clue.’”

Clara shrugged. “I guess it’s a gift. Anyway, do you have another vortex manipulator? Or one of Missy’s time bracelets?”

“The only manipulator on file was the one you broke during the first Zygon incursion. And the Doctor banned any tech from the Master or Missy being archived after an unfortunate incident involving a tissue compression eliminator and Sgt. Benton’s big toe.”

“What happened?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Clara spied a door she hadn’t noticed before (which was odd as she thought she’d thoroughly explored the Black Archive). It had a big silkscreened sign reading _KEEP OUT_ pinned to it. Scrawled across the sign in the Doctor’s unmistakable chicken-scratch handwriting were the additional words: _This means you, humans! (Clara OK.)_

“This is new,” Clara said.

Osgood came up behind her. “I don’t remember seeing it before, either. I was last in here a couple of months back to file a “donation,” and I know this room wasn’t here then. The Doctor must have set up this room without telling anyone.”

“I wonder why he didn’t tell me?” Clara felt a pang of disappointment at being left out of the loop. She wasn’t successful in keeping the tone out of her voice.

“Clara, the Doctor doesn’t tell you everything he does. You’re not his keeper.”

Clara smirked. “Says you.” She tried the door handle, expecting it to be locked, but felt warmth pass through her palm as the handle glowed. A quiet click of a lock unlocking followed. “Looks like I still have some favour with him, at least.”

“Biometrics, presumably keyed just to you,” Osgood observed. “Have I gotten around this particular visit to repeating how jealous I am of what you two share?”

“You could always come with us,” Clara offered as she opened the door. “He likes you. Both of you.”

“You know I’d just cramp your style, Clara,” Osgood said, wistfully. “He only has eyes for you.”

“Don’t be silly. And you’re letting your humanness show, Osgood.”

Osgood paused in the doorway. “Nice try, Clara. Don’t you know that both of us are crazy about the Doctor? We both dress like him, one of us fell for all three of him back when the peace treaty was negotiated, and one of us fell for him when he gave that epic speech about the futility of war and offered forgiveness. Nothing like a good speech to get to the heart of a Zygon. And spending a few days sharing your memories of him did no harm, either. Now, shall we see what the big secret is all about?”

Nodding, Clara went in first.

The room seemed to be in total darkness—oddly, not even ambient light from the main archive chamber outside filtered through the door. It was as if an opaque black curtain had been dropped over the threshold. Clara reached along the wall for a light switch, but, as soon as her entire body crossed into the darkness, she realised she didn’t need it. It wasn’t an absence of light—it was a perception filter. Once fully inside the room, she saw her surroundings were brightly lit. She reached back through the filter and took Osgood’s arm, pulling her inside.

Clara was actually a bit underwhelmed, and disappointed, at how empty the chamber was. Given the lengths to which the Doctor went to shield it, she’d have expected more than a five-foot-tall marble plinth with a featureless black box the size of a Rubik’s Cube on top placed at dead centre.

Clara and Osgood looked at each other, confused.

“I used to be good at solving Rubik’s Cubes,” Osgood offered.

“Get out of my head, Petronella, I was just about the say that,” Clara laughed as she approached the plinth (remembering, with sudden fondness, how the last Doctor she knew loved saying the word). She gingerly picked up the cube and nearly dropped it due to its unexpected weight. It might have looked like a Rubik, but it had the weight of a very full, very large bag of sugar; she needed two hands to hold it.

“OK, heavy thing in my hands. Now what?” Clara asked.

“Nothing. You just needed to touch it, Clara. You can put it down now,” came a Scottish-accented voice from behind her. Both Clara and Osgood started at the sight of the Doctor standing in the room with them, his imposing eyebrows raised benignly and his grey hair appearing backlit, despite the absence of any light source behind him.

Clara did as she was told and then turned to the Doctor, angrily. “Have you been here the whole time? Is this another one of your tests? What the hell, Doctor?”

The Doctor replied. “I’ve been present for about twelve seconds. And this is not a test, because I’m not really here.” The image refocused on the second occupant of the room. “Oh, hi, Osgood. Nice magician outfit, though my lining is red, not blue, as you can see.” He gestured to the lining of his own formal suit with a flourish.

“What do you mean, you’re not here?” Clara demanded. She walked over to the Doctor and swiped her hand through his apparent body.

“I am a projection created by the piece of the TARDIS matrix on that plinf… plint … ach, why did I ever like that word? On that wee pedestal.”

Clara stared at the cube. “This is part of the TARDIS?”

“A detachable component. Like an external hard drive. It powers this AI simulation. I placed it here to provide a resource for you in case I’m no longer around. Touch activated and keyed only to you, like the room itself. If you’re here now, I must assume I am dead. I’m … sorry.” AI or not, sim!Doctor actually looked sorrowful.

“No, you’re not dead, at least I hope not,” Clara said. The sim!Doctor seemed to perk up at this. Could AIs feel hopeful? “But you are hurt and a long way away and you sent me a message on the psychic paper. You know we do that, yeah?” The sim!Doctor nodded. “You need … _he_ needs me to get to him. And he told me to come to the Black Archive. My guess is to find you.”

“There is no longer any time-travel tech in the Black Archive,” sim!Doctor said. “Unless UNIT’s found anything since I was last here?” This last was addressed to Osgood, who shook her head. Even to someone used to duplication like Osgood, this whole thing just felt weird.

“There is one thing I can do, but it breaks the laws of time,” sim!Doctor said. “If we’re not careful, all reality as you know it could come to an end.”

“Will it help me save you?” Clara asked.

“It may facilitate that end, or it may not.”

Clara looked resolutely at the simulation of the Doctor. “Let’s do it, then.”

Osgood grabbed Clara’s arm, “Clara, think. Whatever he, or it, has in mind, I can’t let you risk reality. The Doctor means the universe to me, too, but he’s not worth the risk. He would say so himself.”

“He’s worth it to me.”

“Clara, are you listening to yourself? I know that you and he are … close … but you’re letting that cloud your judgement.”

“Osgood, how many times has the Doctor saved me? Saved us? Saved the earth? Saved the whole damn universe? We owe him. I owe him.”

Sim!Doctor appeared to clear his throat. “You haven’t heard my idea yet.”

Clara turned in his direction. “So, let’s hear it.”

“Cromer,” he said simply, casting his eyes in Osgood’s direction.

“You have got to be kidding me,” the UNIT scientist replied. “As if today couldn’t get any more surreal.” 

“What about Cromer?” Clara asked the simulation, but Osgood answered. 

“That’s the code word the Brigadier came up with to describe the first time we had to deal with … multiple Doctors, back in the 1970s or ’80s,” she said. “Since then, it’s become a general catch-all for any time an ‘out-of-sequence’ Doctor turns up.”

Sim!Doctor picked up the thread: “My point is the only way Clara can get to me, wherever I currently am, is to use a TARDIS. And assuming that contacting Missy is out of the question, there is only one reliable source of TARDISes, and that’s me. An earlier me. Look back at the pedestal.”

A small, wristwatch-like device with two buttons had materialised next to the cube.

“Clara, put that on your right wrist and press the green button. It will summon one of me at random. It will also override the protocols that prevent the TARDIS from landing within the Black Archive—sorry, Osgood, I devised a workaround to that years ago. Don’t tell Kate. Now here comes the tricky part.”

Sim!Doctor paused, almost as if he was hesitant to continue. Oh, great, Clara thought, even his simulations have a flair for the dramatic. Taking a simulated deep breath, he continued. “When the past me exits the TARDIS, I likely won’t be alone. You must give me and any companions a few moments to clear the ship and then you must press the red button.”

“What will that button do?”

“It will send a subsonic signal through the room. Anyone inside will experience sudden dizziness and pass out for about ten minutes. You’ll be shielded, Clara, so long as you keep the wristband on. I only provided one, however, so, Osgood, you will need to leave and close the door behind you before this happens, otherwise it’ll be lullabies for you, too.”

“And then what?” Clara asked.

“You take his TARDIS,” sim!Doctor answered. “Follow the lessons I’ve given you, trust the TARDIS to guide you, and you’ll find me. Once you have, set the timer and press the Fast Return button. The earlier TARDIS will come back here, by which time Osgood will have given the other me and any applicable companions a zap with the Black Archives’ memory erase thingy.” The sim!Doctor gave Osgood an infuriating wink.

“Once the hopefully empty older TARDIS returns,” he continued, “Osgood will need to get me and any others back into the control room. I always carry my TARDIS key in a left breast pocket. I’d ask Clara to lend you hers, but I had the lock changed a few times so it wouldn’t do you any good. Osgood will then replace the TARDIS key where she found it—don’t even think about making a copy or a mould of it, by the way, it can’t be done—then exit the ship and I’ll send it off in a random direction, with a malfunction registered in the memory banks. These things happened all the time in the old days, so I won’t think anything of it, and the erase thingy will assure I retain no memory of meeting you, Clara, or you, Osgood.”

“I don’t like the idea of you forgetting me. Makes me feel sad,” Clara said. 

“Me, too,” sim!Doctor said, which seemed to startle the simulation as much as it did Clara. “Are you ready?” he asked, clearly trying to change the subject.

“Osgood, you better go outside now,” Clara said.

“I don’t like this. If the world blows up I’m coming back to haunt the both of you, and I won’t be alone.” Nonetheless, Osgood squeezed Clara’s arm and exited quickly. Clara waited until she heard the door latch shut.

“So, how much of him is in you?” Clara asked the sim!Doctor, quietly.

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Did he do some funky brain-in-a-box thing where all his memories and thoughts got stored inside you?”

“I use data extrapolated from his interactions with you and other information stored by the TARDIS. It’s enough for me to justify being familiar with you in our interactions, and recognising people like Osgood, but I’m not meant to be a back-up copy of the Doctor, if that’s what you mean, Clara. He’s the full-length novel. I’m the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book.”

“So you … so you can’t tell me for sure how he feels about me, then.”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“And if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear you were an AI trying to avoid giving an answer.”

The sim!Doctor looked distinctly uncomfortable, and then something in his expression changed. She knew it was a simulation, that her Doctor was trillions of miles away. But, for a moment, sim!Doctor seemed to stop being a simulation.

“I’m not the Doctor, Clara. But, based upon the data I have, and the facts in evidence, such as you being the only human he ever properly taught TARDIS flight to, and you being the only person who he trusted enough with access to this place, and the fact he has an entire room in the TARDIS dedicated to … uh … never mind. Does it need saying?”

Clara smiled. “Some day, yes. But not today. OK, so you better disappear while I do this.” She put on the wristband and placed her finger on the green button. “I wonder which one I’ll get? I sort of feel like Harry Potter digging into a box those random jellybeans. Will I get the strawberry flavour or will I get the vomit?”

Sim!Doctor began to vanish slowly. “Make sure to only push the green button once,” he said. “You don’t need an army of Doctors turning up. Good luck, Clara.”

She pushed the button as sim!Doctor faded out of sight.

**Next episode: Harpo...**


	3. Harpo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In hopes of finding a way to get Clara across light years and centuries, she and Osgood discover a secret chamber within UNIT's Black Archive. Within that chamber, a simulation of the Doctor guides Clara to take a risky measure to secure herself a TARDIS.

Nothing happened. The room retained its claustrophobia-inducing silence. Did the button work? Were the batteries dead on the wristband? That would be so much like him. Should she push it again and risk having to deal with a panopticon of Time Lords (or whatever the proper plural was)? No, Clara; patience. Just wait.

After what felt like minutes, Clara felt familiar goosebumps erupt on her neck as her hair was gently stirred, as if by a lover’s breath. It was her favourite part of the TARDIS arriving in an intimate surrounding such as her flat or the supply closet at Coal Hill. With a nervous smile, she looked around the room, trying to predict where exactly the ship would materialise.

Clara sensed that it would appear in the corner farthest from where she was standing, so she stayed put, her arms folded nervously. The blue box faded into view with a trumpeting groan, followed by a thump as it solidified in place, a small cloud of displaced dust rising from the floor.

As Clara braced for the awkward introduction to come, she examined the TARDIS’s exterior. The lack of a St. John’s Ambulance sticker on the door suggested it wasn’t one of the very first Doctors, since she knew most Doctors after the one she nicknamed “Moe” did not display the logo; it was something the TARDIS only revived with “Bow Tie,” and she realised with disappointment that this meant she wouldn’t be seeing _him_ again. She could have used a familiar face. The colouring of the ship was a more subdued shade of blue than she was used to, as well. And it was clean, without the detritus that blemished the so-called Doctor of War’s timeship. Again, she was disappointed. She really liked “Captain Grumpy.”

The door of the TARDIS opened and Clara nearly laughed as she recognised the Doctor’s multicoloured coat before she saw his face: robust, blonde, imperious, forty-ish by human standards, a ringer for Harpo Marx if the light hit him the right way. A man with no sartorial sense whatsoever, given his outfit that would have made Joseph throw his Technicolour Dreamcoat away, declaring it an inferior knock-off to the masterwork this man wore.

The sixth Doctor peered out the door of the TARDIS and his intense eyes focused on Clara. “Hello,” he said, jovially, with a thin smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, making him look like a cat that hadn’t decided whether to eat the mouse, play with the mouse a little first and then eat it, or forget the mouse entirely in favour of chasing a little piece of tinfoil that had suddenly blown past on a light breeze.

“Hi,” Clara replied, with a wave that did nothing to disguise her nervousness. A slight feeling of relief followed, however, as she rationalised that someone seeing a box arrive loudly out of nowhere would be expected to be nervous.

“Do you mind telling me where we are? My … ship’s sensors seem to be a bit inconclusive on this point,” he asked, still poking his head out the door.

_Dammit, Doctor, why aren’t you coming outside?_ “Earth, I think. Can you come over here for a moment? I need your help with something.”

Slowly, too slowly for Clara’s tastes, the Doctor came out of the TARDIS and looked around, cautiously. Clara had a sudden rush of panic before she realised that the plinth was nowhere to be seen; either withdrawn into the floor or cloaked. One less awkward question to worry about.

“Doctor, what’s going on?” An American East Coast-accented voice, female, came through the door.

“Come along, Peri. I don’t think this young lady means us any harm.”

A woman with shoulder-length, curly brown hair with elfin features and wearing what looked like a yellow barbershop quartet singer’s suit followed the Doctor out. Clara couldn’t help but smile. Of course, it would be her. 

“I’m the Doctor. This is my companion, Peri. And you are?”

“Cl … er … Courtney Woods,” Clara lied. Just a little temporal insurance.

“Well, Courtney, you’ve answered the question of what planet, and by your dress I’d have to say early twenty-first century. Hmm … your accent … Blackpool?”

Clara nodded.

The Doctor smiled and turned to his companion. “See, Peri, just as I promised. I said I’d take you to Blackpool and I got the sums right for once!” He clapped his hands together and turned to Clara. “Just out of curiosity, there aren’t any Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, megalomaniac Time Lords or Zygons about, are there?”

_The more things change…_ Clara thought. She shook her head. “Uh, what are they?”

“Never mind. Would you be so kind as to point us in the direction of the Pleasure Beach?”

“Uh, sure, it’s in that direction.” Clara pointed at the exit. The Doctor nodded and he and Peri started to pass by. Clara reached for her right wrist in order to press the red button and found her left hand gripped firmly, but gently, by the Doctor.

“I recognised that device on your wrist the moment I left the TARDIS,” the Doctor said, kindly, but a little menacingly. “Care to tell me how you got your hands on a piece of Gallifreyan technology that _I_ invented?”

“Doctor, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you,” Clara said. 

“Try again. You obviously know me. My first clue to that was you didn’t even seem tempted to ask me ‘Doctor who?’”

“Doctor, you have to trust me.”

“We’ve heard that line before,” Peri chimed in. “Usually doesn’t end well.”

The Doctor waved Peri back. “From my experience, Peri, people who have technology they shouldn’t have yet are often up to no good. Or, at the very least, she’s a thief. Are you working for the Slitheen?”

“Please let me go and I’ll explain,” Clara insisted, burying the disappointment at being accused of thievery.

The Doctor complied. “I thought you said you couldn’t tell me. Makes you a rather indecisive villain, doesn’t it?”

“Doctor, I’m not a villain. I’m a friend. And I need to borrow your TARDIS,” Clara said, rubbing her wrist, although that was more a reflex action as the Doctor’s grip had been very gentle.

“Do you now? The sign over there reads ‘Police Box,’ it doesn’t read ‘Hertz.’” 

Oh, to hell with this. Trusting the Black Archive’s memory eraser to do its job later, Clara took a deep breath. “I need your TARDIS because I need to rescue you.”

Peri scoffed and interrupted the Doctor’s intended reply. “You’re not making sense, lady,” she said.

“I’m telling the truth. I need to get to a planet fifty light years from Earth and four hundred years in the past. And quickly.”

“To rescue me?” the Doctor said. “Do I look like I need rescuing?”

“No, _you_ don’t. Not yet. Come on Doctor, do the math.”

The Doctor peered into Clara’s eyes. She hoped he wouldn’t try to do that mind meld-like trick on her. Normally, she didn’t mind it at all; it gave her a sense of intimacy with her Doctor that was indescribable. But this wasn’t her Doctor, and what he’d see would undoubtedly tear reality apart—his, or everyone else’s, memory wipe be damned.

Instead, he just asked: “Which one of me?”

“A future you. That’s all I can say.” She meant it. If she’d been travelling with, say, the seventh or eighth Doctor, she might have been able to get away with giving specifics. But she was the companion of a Doctor who, according to the rules of the Time Lords in place when the sixth was alive, should not exist. If she even hinted that her Doctor was, technically, the fourteenth, well beyond Rassilon’s limit, she could cause damage all the memory-erasing devices in the world could not fix. Or, worse, this Doctor might stop believing her and high tail it out of there.

“It’s bad?” the sixth Doctor asked.

Clara nodded. 

“How bad?”

“I don’t know. I lost communication with him but he said regeneration is a distinct possibility.”

“How did he contact you?”

_Damn!_ Clara suddenly couldn’t remember which Doctor first used the psychic paper. “Uh, I got a distress signal. On my phone.” _Damn! Which Doctor first did the superphone thing for his companions?_

Fortunately, this Doctor didn’t push the issue. “You didn’t need subterfuge or borrowing gadgets to make us take a nap. I’ll take you to him.”

Clara shook her head. “No … that’s too risky. Besides, I know how to pilot the TARDIS.”

Peri laughed. “That’s impossible. Only the Doctor knows how to fly the TARDIS and even then he can barely get us down the block at times!” The Doctor glared at her.

And so did Clara. “Impossible is my middle name.” She returned her gaze to the Doctor. “He … you taught me.”

The Doctor looked at her with renewed interest. “Are you, in the vernacular, ‘taking the piss’?”

“What, do you think a pudding brain like me can’t handle it?” Clara was getting fed up and made no attempt to hide it anymore. _Her_ Doctor would have accepted the facts by now, without keeping her spinning her wheels.

Peri laughed. “Pudding brain! Hey, you ought to write that one down, Doctor!”

“I might, at that,” he admitted, sheepishly. “I meant no disrespect, Miss Woods. I had long believed that human brains, while it’s unfair to compare them to a dessert, are incapable of processing the data required to operate a TARDIS. The only non-Time Lords I’ve ever known who could do it were Adric and Nyssa, non-humans who were super-geniuses.”

“Well, meet a _human_ girl who can,” Clara said, with not a little bit of pride. Her Doctor had never told her how unique she was. Was it because of Miss Kizlet’s temporary upgrading of her brain years before? Talent and skill? Yeah, definitely talent and skill.

The Doctor shrugged. “Blackpool’s amusements will have to wait, Peri. Alright, Miss Woods, lead on. I’ll let you drive.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor, I can’t let you come with me.”

“Why not?” asked Peri.

“The Doctor knows why, don’t you,” said Clara. A statement of fact; not a question. 

For a moment, the sixth Doctor glowered at her. And then his expression softened as he realised the danger of intentionally going too close to his future self, especially one that could be about to expire; if there was one taboo stronger than breaking the First Law of Time, it was witnessing one’s own future death. “You know about the Fast Return switch, I assume?”

“It’s a button these days, but yeah. Soon as I find him, I’ll send the TARDIS right back to you, I promise. You still have a lot to do, Doctor. I’m not planning on stealing your ride.”

Peri looked worried. “What happens to us in the meantime?”

Clara looked at the device on her wrist. “There’s no point knocking you out now. You shouldn’t be waiting long before my friend arrives,” she said. “But, I’m sorry, I can’t let you keep any memories of this.”

“But you haven’t told us anything,” Peri protested.

“Yes, she has,” her Doctor replied. “The very fact we know I exist into a future incarnation is too much information. If Courtney was one of me, then Time would naturally prevent us from retaining the knowledge of this encounter anyway. You don’t think Scarecrow and Jamie McCrimmon remembered anything from our little tête-à-tête in Spain, do you? But she’s just a human—no offence—and I don’t know if the same effect will happen.”

“That’s why we can’t take a chance,” Clara said.

“How will it be done?” the Doctor asked. “I taught the great hypnotist Reveen all he knows, but I’m not the best hypnotic subject.” 

“A friend of mine—who’ll one day be a friend of yours—is going to come in after I leave and use a bit of UNIT tech on you; you’re in London, by the way. Black Archive?” said Clara. The Doctor nodded in recognition of the place. “I’m afraid this time it will knock you out, but it won’t hurt. You’ll wake up back in your TARDIS with no memory of the last hour or so. We’ll pop a little bit of false info into the TARDIS system to disguise things as a minor malfunction and you’ll continue on, none the wiser. And, hopefully, by then I’ll be back with my Doctor.”

“Sounds simple.”

“I haven’t rescued him yet.”

“True, true.” The Doctor put out his hand and Clara took it. “I’m glad to see my taste in choosing my companions will not diminish over time.” And then something in Clara’s eye caught his attention. “You _are_ just my companion, not… something more?” He flicked his eyes down towards her left hand that he was grasping, as if he was looking for something.

Clara fought back the urge to steal a catchphrase and reply, “Spoilers,” but instead just said, “Maybe.”

The two locked eyes for a moment, long enough for Peri to interject: “Get a room, guys.”

That broke the spell, and the Doctor had to be content with Clara’s answer as he released his grip. “Good luck, Courtney. Give me my best regards, won’t you?”

“You know I will, Doctor.”

“Nice to meet you,” Peri said, and shook Clara’s hand, too. Clara tried not to let a hint of sadness pass over her face. She knew Peri’s future was destined to be … complex. 

“Oh, one more thing, Doctor. Not much of a spoiler here, but you will change the locks at some point down the line, so my key won’t work on your TARDIS. Could you…” Clara gestured towards its keyhole. 

“Actually, I have a better idea,” the Doctor said. He reached into one of his pockets and took out a key, folding it into Clara’s hand and giving her a flashback of her Doctor doing the same thing. “Just leave this inside the TARDIS when you’re done. Drop it on the floor or something and I’ll assume it fell out of my pocket.”

“Are you sure?” Clara asked. She knew how protective the Doctor was of his TARDIS keys. She tried not to think back to the terrible day she abused that knowledge.

“Don’t worry, my dear. I have seven others.”

Clara accepted the key with a nod and put it in the lock. Or tried to, anyway. It wouldn’t go in. “Uh…” she asked.

“Oh, right.” The Doctor reached over and flipped the front of the lock plate clockwise to reveal another slot underneath it. “One of me got a bit paranoid of police trying to get inside to eat their lunch and had the TARDIS install a fake. If your TARDIS doesn’t have this useless thing anymore, there is indeed hope for the future.”

Clara smiled and unlocked the TARDIS. 

“You know I cannot vouch for how she’ll react to you,” the Doctor said. “She’s getting a bit cantankerous in her old age.”

“Oh, the two of us reached an understanding a long time ago.” Clara opened the door.

“Was that before or after she pulled the ‘tiger in the bathroom’ trick and then trapped you in a time loop for a weekend?” Peri asked.

Clara just laughed.

The Doctor took a step closer to her and said, quietly. “I look forward to meeting you, the long way around.”

She looked back at the Doctor and found herself unable to resist saying to him, with a wink, “Run, you clever boy!” The door closed behind her.

“What was _that_ supposed to mean?” Peri said as she and the Doctor gave their TARDIS room to dematerialise. “Funny, that woman who sacrificed herself to save us on Titan last year said the same thing. She actually looked a bit like Courtney, too. You don’t think…”

The Doctor shrugged. “The universe works in mysterious ways, Peri.” The TARDIS began to dematerialise; within a few moments, it had vanished. “Smooth take-off,” he remarked with admiration. He’d clearly taught Courtney—or whatever her name is; that name had sounded as real as John Smith—well.

“Uh, hello,” came a voice from the chamber threshold. Osgood stood holding a camera. Oh, my. This one was taller than his UNIT file photo suggested. And they were supposed to be asleep. Oh, well, needs must. “Do you mind if I take a couple of photos of your coat before we proceed? For reference purposes?”

**Next episode: Quijote...**


	4. Quijote

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After rolling the dice that doing so won't destroy the universe, Clara has summoned the sixth incarnation of the Doctor and his companion, Peri, and borrows their TARDIS in order to rescue her Doctor from the remote planet Quijote...

Although take-off had appeared to be instantaneous from the outside, inside the TARDIS time moved differently and it had actually taken Clara several minutes to find her bearings before she could depart. In contrast to the library-like TARDIS she’d gotten used to since first meeting the Doctor, this TARDIS interior was bright, glaring, headache-aggravating white, with a console that resembled something out of a 1970s sci-fi TV show. But one of the first lessons the Doctor had given her about piloting a TARDIS is that, while the desktop might differ, the controls that mattered would always be in the same place. More or less.

Before she could begin fiddling with the TARDIS’ controls, however, she had to introduce herself. One of the secrets the Doctor had revealed to her about piloting a TARDIS was that they tended not to react well to complete strangers mucking about.

“Hello,” she said to the air around her. “My name is … uh … I don’t know if I can tell you, actually. I know you experience things across all space and time. So you probably know I’m from your future at least, the Doctor’s future. And you probably already know there’s a bit of future-you outside making this possible. I need to know we’re good because I’m going to fly you now to save the Doctor. My Doctor. And if you help me get there, I promise I’ll send you right back to your Doctor. Are you OK with this?”

The lights in the console room dimmed slightly and then regained their brightness. “I’m going to assume that was a yes.” As she said this, she located the computer terminal and inputted the names “Mu Arae” and “Quijote” and “third moon.” A string of numbers appeared, which she dutifully entered into the nav console. Then she entered “1605, April 26, 9:30 am,” and was about to enter the resulting data string into the nav when she gave her forehead a frustrated slap. “Stupid, stupid Clara,” she muttered; she’d forgotten to convert to Gallifreyan time. Using a formula the Doctor had taught her, Clara entered a revised string of numbers into the nav.

Taking a deep breath, and hoping she wasn’t about to take half the Black Archive with her when this TARDIS dematerialised, she pulled the lever. As the rotor began to pump up and down, she gave a whoop of delight. 

It never got old. 

***

Some four hundred years earlier and three hundred trillion miles away, the sixth Doctor’s TARDIS arrived in orbit around the third moon of Quijote. This was accidental. Clara still needed to learn to compensate for orbital drift; if the moon hadn’t been orbiting a planet orbiting a star orbiting the centre mass of a galaxy orbiting god knows what, she’d probably have materialised inside a mountain. So, Clara reckoned arriving in orbit over the target planet in the correct century counted as a win.

After remembering (at the last second—and boy would that have been embarrassing) that the Doctor wouldn’t install the atmospheric shields that allowed the ship’s doors to be opened in flight until his eighth incarnation, Clara activated the scanner instead, offering a view of what was actually a very pretty-looking moon.

Taking a deep breath, Clara took out the psychic paper. She’d been unable to bring herself to look at it since she’d departed Coal Hill what felt like hours earlier (even though, to her amazement, it had only been about seventy minutes). She gave the paper a light kiss (on occasion, the Doctor had been able to sense when she’d done that) and then concentrated:

     **Doctor, I’m here.**

…

     **Doctor, I’m here!**

     **Please answer me.**

_Clara?_

Clara’s knees nearly gave out in relief.

     **It’s me.**

_You actually did it?_

_Without a TARDIS?_

_You are the Impossible Girl._

     **No, Doctor.**

     **Your hologram helped me.**

     **And so did Dreamcoat-you.**

     **Borrowed his TARDIS.**

_Who-coat me?_

     **Never mind.**

     **Are you OK?**

_It’s not good, Clara._

_Major internal bleeding._

_Imminent organ failure._

_Might not be able to get out of this one._

     **Don’t say that.**

     **I’m here to take you home.**

_Gallifrey?_

     **No, silly. Earth!**

     **I need to know where you are.**

_You have a TARDIS?_

     **Your TARDIS, but from earlier.**

_Get her to scan for life signs._

_Humanoid. It should just be me…_

     **OK, I can do...**

_…and the Cybermen._

     **The what.**

**Next episode: Nightmares Come to Life...**


	5. Nightmares Come to Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mission accomplished: Clara has successfully navigated her borrowed TARDIS to the remote planet Quijote, only to find that the Doctor isn't alone...

Either due to his injury, or out of fear, the Doctor did not reply when Clara fired back, “ **And you were going to tell me this _when_?** ” through the psychic paper after he’d dropped that little bombshell.

Next to the Daleks, the Cybermen were Clara’s least-favourite evil alien race. She knew the Doctor frowned upon her calling any race “evil.” After all, she wouldn’t want to call any ethnic grouping of humans “evil,” as that would be racist, and as both Rusty the Dalek and Bonnie proved, no one was above redemption. He even told her of a Cyberman named Kroton who had regained the ability to feel emotion and became something of a hero back in the day. But she couldn’t help it. To her, the Cybermen were and always would be _evil_. 

When she was a little girl, the Borg on _Star Trek_ gave her nightmares, leading to her parents having a huge argument over her dad letting four-year-old Clara sit on his knee and watch as the aliens assimilated Captain Picard and everyone in their path.

The Cybermen, she found, were her nightmares come to life. The Doctor tried to make light of it, claiming that the Borg were inspired by some of the rumours that circulated following the Cybermen incursion in London in the 1960s or 1970s. But it didn’t work. Yes, she’d held her own when they invaded London a few years earlier, even managing to pretend to be the Doctor for a while. And, yes, she managed OK when she led a group of people into battle against a cell of Cybermen back on Hedgwick’s World of Wonders. But she had been terrified to the core both times. 

Sorry, Doctor, she thought, the Cybermen, as far as she was concerned, were irredeemably evil.

And they took Danny away. 

Clara took a deep breath and activated the TARDIS scanner, setting it for “humanoid.”

As she feared, the screen lit up with dozens of ghostly, human-shaped images on the surface far below. Clara was reminded of night-vision footage she’d seen on TV of suspects viewed from police helicopters. Most of the figures were grouped together, some even recognisably in formation. Those were the Cybermen, obviously. But there was one reading that differed from the others. It was off by itself, some distance away from the nearest Cybermen formation. 

And, of course, that one was waving.

Clara couldn’t help but smile at that. But now came the hard part: landing the TARDIS in a location that was close enough to access the Doctor—but without accidentally landing on him (she was ninety-nine-per cent certain there was a safety to prevent that sort of thing; it was the one per cent she was worried about). Materialising a hundred feet up in the air and crashing to the ground would also be embarrassing and would probably result in a lifetime of the TARDIS projecting holographic tigers in the bathroom. 

“No, smarten up, Clara, you got this,” she spoke to herself, pushing down what threatened to erupt into a, for her, rare panic attack. She remembered the Doctor’s training, input the data that showed up on the scanner, crossed her fingers, held her breath, prayed that if she went astray she’d at least land on a few Cybermen, and pulled the lever.

The rotor began to move up and down again, the familiar trumpeting reverberated through the TARDIS and then, a few moments later, everything came to a sudden stop with a _thump!_ indicating the TARDIS had arrived. A moment later, Clara found herself dropping to her knees as the TARDIS fell the last couple of feet.

“OK, I know my sums were right, you did that to me on purpose,” she called out as she got off the floor. “At least I didn’t aim for London and land in Bristol! You might not know this, but where I come from, you and I are bezzie mates. A bezzie mate is not someone who drops their friend from ten feet up in the air!”

She approached the exit and spent a few moments fruitlessly trying to find a handle. “How the hell do I get out of here? If you made the doorknob vanish again, I swear I’ll…”

A beep sounded at the console. Clara looked back to see a handle glowing. And then she remembered that it was only recently (in relative terms) that the Doctor had adjusted the exit mechanism so it worked like a regular door. In the older version of the TARDIS, you actually had to pull a lever on the console to open the doors. “Oh, yeah, right… I knew that,” she said, unconvincingly. She pulled the lever and the rather large, roundel-covered doors folded inwards. Clara then walked through the black void that separated the console room from the outside—she realised it was the same type of perception cloak that kept the interior of the Doctor’s room at the Black Archive invisible to those outside.

She stuck her head out of the doorway and looked around. The sight took her breath away. Literally, as the air was as thin as the summit of Mount Everest (having been there thanks to the Doctor aiming for _Everett_ , Washington, and missing the target by about seven thousand miles, she knew from experience). 

She ducked back inside, took a deep breath of TARDIS air, and retrieved a small, clear mask she carried in a zippered pocket in her black faux-leather jacket. She fitted the mask over her nose and mouth; it adhered gently to her skin and microscopic oxygen processors allowed her to breathe. She’d taken to carrying one since that Mount Everest episode (it was actually a bit of Torchwood tech Osgood scrounged; the Doctor kept asking to borrow it).

Her air supply assured, she exited the TARDIS again and surveyed the area. The temperature was crisp, but no worse than a mild winter’s day. The sky was clear and amber in colour, with one of the other moons of Quijote visible above the horizon. Despite the thin atmosphere, she could see a large number of trees dotting the landscape. Most seemed healthy, obviously adapted to the conditions, but there were a couple that looked really gnarled and dead. No sign of the Doctor. She called out, but the air was too thin to carry her voice very far and the mask prevented her from yelling very loud anyway.

She pulled out the psychic paper.

     **I need a landmark.**

     **I can’t see you.**

…

     **Stay with me, Doctor.**

     **What do you see?**

_Beard._

     **Beard?**

     **That’s not helpful.**

     **I need more.**

_Tree._

     **Lots of trees here.**

     **Still not helping.**

_Tree._

_Beard._

_Tree._

_Beard._

Oh god, Clara thought, he’s losing his … wait a minute.

     **TREEBEARD?**

_Finally!_

_Waiting for me to paint a picture?_

“OK, where the hell was it?” Clara looked around for the dead trees she spotted earlier. There was one about fifty yards to her right; she made out the top of another about a hundred yards to her left. Fifty-fifty chance; she went to her left first.

“Are you Treebeard? Please be Treebeard,” she said as she approached the first tree, hoping it was close enough to the _Lord of the Rings_ character. “And, of course, you aren’t!” She saw instantly that there was no Doctor anywhere nearby and gave momentary consideration to aiming a hefty kick at the trunk before figuring that doing so might be tempting karma a bit too much. Her luck, she’d break a toe and that would do the Doctor no good. And the dying tree looked so pathetic, she’d feel guilty for doing it.

She felt the psychic paper vibrate in her pocket.

_Hurry._

_Can’t stay awake much longer._

“Dammit!” Clara cried. And then she cried “Dammit!” a second time as she looked down the long slope under the tree and saw flashes of silver moving in their general direction. “Dammit!”—once more, with feeling.

Clara hated running. Not that she wasn’t good at it—to be the Doctor’s companion, you had to have the running part down pat and she figured she could give the London Marathon a healthy go by now—she just never cared for the activity. But you wouldn’t have known it to see Clara Oswald take off like a 100-metre-dash contestant in the direction of the other tree. 

After some minor stumbles along the way, and one tumble down an incline and over a football-sized rock that she knew would leave a spectacular bruise on her shoulder later, Clara reached the second tree.

No Doctor.

“No! No! Where are you, Doctor?” It would have been so easy for him to have been found sprawled in the shade of the ancient tree. What if both her guesses were wrong? What if at that moment the Cybermen were coming upon a _third_ tree, with the Doctor at their mercy? What if he ended up assimilated like Danny—trapped and tortured in an iron maiden from which there was no escape?

“ _Clara…_ ”

Clara scrambled to take the psychic paper out of her pocket. But there was nothing on it.

“ _Clara…_ ”

Wait a minute. That wasn’t the paper. She _heard_ that.

“Doctor?” Clara called out.

“Down here,” the Doctor replied. 

Clara scrambled past the trunk and looked down a steep incline. She could see the Doctor’s unmistakable silver hair as he tried, without success owing to the angle of the incline and the fact Time Lord necks are not designed to work like Pez dispensers, to look up at her. “Stupid Doctor. Stupid. Stupid,” the Doctor kept muttering to himself. He was still holding the psychic paper in his hand. Everything from his mid-torso down was pinned under rocks.

Clara slid down to his level, speaking softly. “It’s alright, Doctor, I’m here. This is another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Stanley.”

The Doctor grinned, despite being in obvious discomfort. He reached over and took Clara’s hand and squeezed. “Sorry, Ollie. This is twice you’ve found your own way across time and space for me. I really need to start paying you.”

Clara laughed and squeezed his hand tight, trying not to fixate on the rocks covering his body. “What happened?”

“See that cave up there?”

“Uh, there’s no cave up there, Doctor.”

“That’s the point. I thought it was a cave, but it turned out to be some sort of ancient trap left here by some long-extinct inhabitants who were presumably hunting some other equally long-extinct inhabitants and didn’t have the common courtesy to disable their traps before becoming long-extinct.”

“How can I help?”

“Don’t know if you can. My right leg feels OK, just pinned, but I lost feeling in my other leg a while ago. And this bloody great rock has been pushing down on my torso and I’m pretty certain that one of the kidneys I was complaining about is damaged. I feel myself getting weaker, though I’ve slowed the process down by stopping one of my hearts.” He looked Clara in the eye. “It’s pretty bad. Might have been a wasted trip for you.”

“I’m going to get you out of this, and I’m not going to wait till you regenerate either.”

“That’s the thing, Clara,” the Doctor said; Clara noticed for the first time how whispery his voice had become. “If my injuries are too severe, regeneration might not actually happen. Regeneration isn’t the same as creation; it’s just a revamp of what’s already there. The next guy would end up with the same blood loss, and there’s even the chance of a regenloop, and that would be bad. Very bad.”

“Regenloop?” Clara asked, as she took off her jacket to put under the Doctor’s head as a pillow. The cold bit into her bare arms, but she didn’t care.

“It’s when a Time Lord regenerates during an instantly fatal situation into an instantly fatal situation and just keeps regenerating. During the Time War that was one of the most common causes of death—people burning through their thirteen lives in only a few minutes. God knows what might happen to me. There’s every possibility that this was always going to be my last life, too, Clara. Just a bonus the High Council tossed at me on Trenzalore to get you to stop bugging them.” The Doctor cracked a smile. It was an attempt at a joke that was about as successful as you’d expect from somebody slowly bleeding to death.

“Doctor, focus. The Cybermen aren’t far away and we need to get you to … where is your TARDIS?”

“About a hundred metres away.”

“Your earlier TARDIS is parked closer. We can fix you up there.”

“Which one of me? The stately guy with the capes and the nose? I quite liked him. Or teeth and curls? Or was it Sandshoes?”

“Curls, yes, but blonde, and the rainbow coat.”

The Doctor chuckled. “I always thought he was underrated. He reminds me of myself soon after I changed and re-met you. Was I with Peri, Graham, Mel, Flip, one of the others?”

“The one who became either a talk show host or pro-wrestling valet. Peri.”

The Doctor smiled. “We should look in on one of her someday.”

Clara reached down to one of the rocks that pinned the Doctor and started to pull at it, but it wouldn’t budge. She tried again, but couldn’t get it to do any more than shift slightly, eliciting a wince from the Doctor.

“No offence, Clara, but while you did beat me in that arm-wrestling match fair and square…”

“…no I didn’t. I kissed you, remember?”

“As cheating goes, that was a new twist, I will agree. But I don’t think you have the strength to do more than shift this stone slightly, and that might do more harm than good as far as my body’s concerned.”

“OK, do you have any other …” Clara stopped because she heard footsteps above. She put a finger to her transparent oxygen mask-covered lips and the Doctor nodded. 

A tinny, deep monotone voice sounded out. “REPORT.”

A second voice, very slightly feminine in tone, replied: “THE DOCTOR HAS YET TO BE LOCATED. HOWEVER, SENSORS NOW INDICATE THE PRESENCE OF TWO TIME VESSELS IN THE VICINITY.”

The first voice again. “OUR DATA INDICATES ONLY TWO TIME LORDS STILL EXIST AND THE OTHER IS ACCOUNTED FOR. IF THERE IS A THIRD TIME LORD. THEY MUST ALSO BE LOCATED AND ASSIMILATED.”

“UNDERSTOOD.”

A few moments later, the sound of the footsteps faded.

“You know, Doctor, if those guys actually looked like Jeri Ryan rather than weeping air-conditioner units, they wouldn’t be so bad,” Clara whispered, trying to lighten the mood. The Doctor didn’t reply. “Oh come on, Doctor, you told me you had a crush on Seven of Nine, too.”

The Doctor still didn’t reply.

“Doctor?”

He was out cold. Clara quickly checked his hearts. She panicked for a moment when she felt no thumping under his left chest, before remembering he said he’d willed one to stop beating. Under his right side, she could feel his pulse, but it felt slower than it should be. 

“I need to get this rock off of you somehow, Doctor. A lever, that’s what I need.”

A quick scan of the area revealed a few thick branches. Clara shoved one under the rock, but it broke apart immediately. “Well, Space-Mother Nature is going to be no help,” she mumbled. She didn’t want to leave the Doctor, but the TARDIS was her only hope of finding something suitable. 

It was going to have to be the old TARDIS; she wasn’t about to go searching for the other one, not with the Doctor fading and the Cybermen on the hunt.

She stroked the Doctor’s forehead, flipped up her air mask and pressed a quick kiss to his temple before scrambling up the incline. At the crest, she stopped to look for any sign of the Cybermen. She could hear the deep-voiced one barking orders a distance away and idly wondered if it was physically possible for them to whisper and, if so, what a Cyber-whisper would sound like. Satisfied the coast was clear, she made her way to where she’d left the sixth Doctor’s TARDIS. 

She actually walked past it without noticing at first, before the tell-tale signs of a perception filter in use alerted her to its presence. Which at least explained why the Cybermen hadn’t found the ship themselves; Clara hoped the later TARDIS remembered the same trick.

Clara reached for the string around her neck that held her TARDIS key. “Oh, right.” The locks had been changed. She’d put this TARDIS’s key in her trouser pocket.

But it was no longer there. Her finger went through the hole in the pocket quite neatly. 

“No, no, no!” Clara scrambled around fruitlessly for a few moments, then realised the odds of her finding the key were slim to remote—and she needed to get into this TARDIS, now. Otherwise, she faced a long hike to the other one, and who knows what condition the Doctor might be in when she finally got back to him?

A Hail Mary was her only option. She’d been told it was impossible, yet she had done it once before when she needed to rescue the Doctor from a pocket universe. Once again, she spoke to the blue box directly. 

“I know you don’t really know me,” Clara said. “To you I’m a stranger, or maybe a fuzzy echo from the future. And someday you’ll realise what an awful pun that is. So, I don’t know if you are able to trust me. But right now I need you to unlock your door and let me in. The Doctor is hurt. I know he’s not your Doctor. Your Doctor is safe and sound back on Earth in the 21st century. Knowing Osgood, she’s probably getting the pattern for his coat as we speak. As soon as we’re done here I’ll flip that fast-return switch and send you back to him. So I need to get inside anyway, right? You need me to push that switch so you can go back to him and I know that’s one of the systems you can’t trigger yourself. So how about it? You help me, I help you?”

The TARDIS didn’t make a sound. Not that Clara expected her to suddenly say, “Oh, alright then,” or anything like that. But there should have been something. It was almost as if the TARDIS was actually giving some thought to whether to allow a strange human inside. One who did what, as far as Clara knew anyway, no other companion had ever really tried to do—talk to the TARDIS directly, treating her not as a ship, but as a fellow living being. 

It was taking too long. Clara had to pull the trigger.

“If you love the Doctor half as much as I do, you’ll let me in.”

The door to the TARDIS opened. With a smile and an affectionate pat on the “Pull to Open” sign, Clara went inside, removing her mask to conserve its limited oxygen supply.

Finding a crowbar or a length of rebar or anything like that in the TARDIS was not as easy as one would expect. Of course, with a sonic screwdriver or specs or whatever the Doctor was using this week, it wasn’t necessarily something he needed on a day-to-day basis. But this was the man who had entire rooms dedicated to storing Pop Tarts, Ella Fitzgerald records, deflated footballs, inflated footballs, and—for some reason the Doctor continually avoided giving—rubber chickens. The type that screamed bloody murder when they were squeezed. If he had those, surely, he’d have some hardware lying about. Maybe an entire room of crowbars. If only he’d taught her how to properly use the 3-D printer. It didn’t work the same as Earth printers and, sadly, it wasn’t set up to accept voice commands, either. 

The clock was ticking. Back on Earth, she’d had a little breathing room in terms of time, but now she was part of events. The Doctor was dying. She needed to get him free now. And every moment she wasted trying to find a damn crowbar was one moment closer to her losing him.

She found herself looking into an unfamiliar room with a coat of dust covering everything inside. A hat stand stood in the middle of the room, a cream-coloured coat hanging carelessly from the hook. A cricket bat was propped against the wall.

An idea came to Clara. Cricket bats were strong. Good levers.

 _But which Doctor? Which Doctor?_ Clara thought madly. She knew one of the Doctors had a thing for cricket. Did he come before or after Dreamcoat? If he came after, she couldn’t touch any of this stuff. She closed her eyes and tried to call to mind the poster that Osgood had in her office. The poster that always seemed to make her blush when Clara asked about it. What was the order: The Grandfather, Moe, Gadget Man, Teeth and Curls, Cricket, Dreamcoat! 

OK, the one with the cricket came before, so the odds of the sixth or later Doctor needing to save the galaxy by winning a twenty20 were probably pretty slim, so it was safe to borrow it. She scooped up the cricket bat and grabbed a second one she noticed half-shoved under the room’s disused bed. 

As she raced for the exit, Clara found herself irrationally taking a detour to one of the storage rooms and grabbing a medium-sized shopping bag from within. She also took another gamble that the earlier Doctor would not miss one of his special healing bandages; they were infused with an ointment that helped seal and heal wounds. In theory, when the bandage was pure white, everything should be healed, but Clara had no illusions that the most it might do is reduce some of the bleeding if … no, no, _when_ … she got the Doctor free.

Back in the control room, Clara took a quick scan of the console before locating the fast return switch and the connected timer. She set the timer for sixty seconds before flipping the switch.

“See you later, old girl,” Clara said as she quickly made her escape, just barely remembering in time to replace the air mask before she left the protection of the ship.

She didn’t bother to look back as the TARDIS dematerialised behind her. She was too busy running.

**Next episode: Leverage...**


	6. Leverage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armed with two cricket bats that once belonged to the fifth Doctor taken from a TARDIS used by the sixth, Clara races back to try and free the twelfth.

The Doctor’s face was glowing like he’d swallowed a halogen light bulb when Clara arrived back by his side.

“Oh no you don’t,” she said, and slapped him, hard, on the cheek.

The glow faded quickly as the thoroughly startled and suddenly wide-awake Doctor glared at her. “You told me you would never do that again,” he said softly. He looked up at the sky.

“I said I’d never slap you again if I got pissed off at you. This is different. And I’m too busy to be pissed off at you. Remember your promise. You do not leave me!” Clara dropped the cricket bats (the other parcel she’d grabbed had been left at the top of the incline), and set to work shoving one cricket bat under the nearest rock. Then the second, next to it.

“That doesn’t look like a crowbar,” the Doctor observed.

“You took a kip before you could tell me where you hid them in the TARDIS so I had to improvise. What are cricket bats made out of?”

“You choose now to pick my brains about cricket trivia? Someone finally give you a _Trivial Pursuit_ question you couldn’t answer?”

“I’m serious, Doctor.”

“Willow. Usually. Except for the ones we used on Gallifrey, of course.”

“What were they made of?”

“You couldn’t pronounce the name of the wood ... come to think of it, I can’t either ... I think the Time Lord who named it was drunk at the time and just wrote down random letters to annoy the High Council’s Recreation Directorate. No, wait, I think that was me. Well, whatever it’s called, it’s about ten times stronger than willow. Gave one a bit of an unfair advantage against regular Earth bats, I suppose…”

Clara smiled. If his bats were ten times stronger than earthly cricket bats, this could work. She pushed her entire weight against the underside of the bat handle and, soon, leverage began to shift the rock enough to free up some space underneath.

“OK, Doctor, try to move. Now!” She was barely able to speak as she strained against the weight.

The Doctor struggled to shift himself, but his legs wouldn’t answer the call. Instead, he used his arms to physically push himself away from the rock. He immediately felt the relief of unconstrained breathing, but he knew that would only be temporary.

He’d barely cleared the rocks when the bats snapped together, causing everything to crash down on to the ground where he’d been prone. Clara fell hard against the rocks and gasped.

“Clara!” The Doctor tried to move in her direction, but it was like his feet had been encased in concrete.

Clara tried to ignore the pain in her wrists from the shock as she pushed herself off the rocks and scrambled over to the Doctor, unwrapping the bandage she carried and draping the Doctor’s beet-red stomach with it. “I thought you said Gallifreyan cricket bats were ten times stronger than Earth ones!” she griped.

“Which is why I never played with a Gallifreyan cricket bat. Clara, did you just break one of my cricket bats?”

“Uh, both of them, actually. Sorry. But I think we have more important things to worry about,” Clara said. The Doctor looked downcast. “I’ll buy you a new pair!” She wasn’t certain whether to laugh or slap him again. Then she saw the light starting to go out in his eyes.

She lightly patted his face, which fortunately was enough to get his attention. “Hey! Stay with me. You know this bandage should help with the pain like it did when I broke my leg HALO jumping on Ganymede last year, and I need you to help me get you back to the TARDIS and I can’t carry you.”

The Doctor forced himself to grin. “Yes, boss,” he said as he draped his arm over her shoulders. 

Clara braced herself and helped the Doctor to his feet. To her relief, his legs actually bore his weight, though for how much longer remained to be seen. To both of their relief, his left leg started to move, too. “Please tell me your leg was just asleep,” she said. The Doctor nodded. The internal damage was not so easily dismissed, but at least one problem was off the board now.

“I hate climbing,” the Doctor said, looking up the slope. “Very overrated activity. Too much falling involved.”

The two started to work their way up the slippery, forty-five-degree incline—the Doctor first, then Clara—when they heard the monotone of a Cyberman not far away, ordering an underling to keep searching. 

Quietly, they continued to work their way up. Clara looked at the Doctor closely; no sign of the glow. Instead, he was concentrating on putting one foot in front of (or, in this case, slightly above) the other. She tried not to think about what she would, or could, do were he to lose his grip and start falling. Probably just break his fall. And her neck. All in a day’s work.

“Why are there Cybermen here, anyway?” Clara asked.

“I might have tripped and started an uprising against them on a planet a couple of systems thataway.” The Doctor nodded in a vaguely southeasterly direction. “They apparently found that a wee bit annoying.” 

“What is a wee bit annoying is that you didn’t invite me to the party.”

The Doctor stopped climbing—causing Clara to bump her head into the back of one of his legs—and looked down at her. “You just told me you didn’t like Cybermen.”

“All the more reason to enjoy pissing them off!”

They continued climbing, with Clara soon moving alongside the Doctor once she was satisfied that he wasn’t going to slide down the steep slope. As their heads came close to cresting the top of the rise, the Cybermen voices became clearer, more distinct and, most worryingly, closer.

“They’re almost on top of us,” the Doctor said. “I’m slowing you down. Go. I don’t want you to be here, Clara.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“I’d rather you leave me than be converted. You might have been able to give Bonnie a migraine, but even you won’t stand a chance against their assimilation process.”

“Wanna bet?”

“This is no time for your egomania, Clara.”

“And this is no time for a debate. We stay together. End of.”

Heavy footfalls could be heard approaching from the south. The Doctor and Clara scrambled over the top of the rise. They both knew they were dangerously exposed.

“Which way to our TARDIS, Doctor?”

He pointed in a direction just before his legs started to give out. He suddenly put his full weight on Clara, which nearly drove her to her knees.

“When we get out of this, Doctor, you’re going on a diet!”

“I thought you said I was a stick insect.” the Doctor mumbled.

“A damn heavy stick insect.”

“Fine, but no carrot juice. If there’s anything I hate worse than pears…”

“Don’t worry, I hate that stuff, too.” Clara made a face as she half-pulled the Doctor into the bushes and towards a horizontal section of Treebeard’s trunk that was sheltered from view. “Gran kept making me drink it when I was a kid. It’s almost as bad as a wheatgrass cocktail. I was more thinking yogurt and yoga.”

“ _Yoga?_ Are you insane?” The Doctor was so indignant, he almost seemed like his own self again. “Could you actually picture me doing a downward Dalek?”

“Downward dog.”

“Same difference, just as evil.” He sat down on the trunk. “Why are we stopping? Tired already? I could go for miles. And the Cybermen are almost here.”

“Just a little mad idea to buy us a little time.” Clara smiled. “Or,” she shrugged, “it’ll at least give us a laugh as we’re horribly turned into Borgs.”

“Cybermen.”

“Same difference, just as evil.”

Clara ran back to where she’d left the shopping bag. She hadn’t had time to count how many items were inside when she grabbed it from the sixth Doctor’s TARDIS earlier, but there seemed to be plenty for what she had in mind.

The Cybermen voices and footfalls had been coming from the south, so she swiftly made her way to the edge of the clearing where the grass had been tamped down by the “Cy-Borgs” the last time they had been through this way. She upended the bag and scattered its contents on the ground and spread them out before lightly covering the objects with dirt. As an added measure, she anchored the light plastic bag with a small stone a few feet into the clearing.

The Doctor didn’t seem impressed. “Not the most environmentally friendly of companions, are you,” he remarked as she let him wrap an arm around her shoulder and hoist himself off the tree trunk.

“I’ll write Prince Charles a letter of apology when we get home,” she snarked as the two began retreating further into the forest and away from Treebeard.

They were about fifty metres away from the clearing when the screaming began.

**Next episode: Another Option...**


	7. Another Option

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clara has managed to free the Doctor and now they're racing back to the TARDIS, trying to avoid a platoon of Cybermen. And now there's screaming...

The screaming didn’t come from the Doctor, despite a sudden stabbing pain in his abdomen that suggested the healing bandage was ultimately failing. Screaming wasn’t the Doctor’s style (we will ignore that unfortunate event at the Coal Hill School Halloween charity haunted house). 

The screaming didn’t come from Clara, either. She had, admittedly, given out given out the occasional ear-splitting belter in her time—nothing would ever top her reaction to finding a holographic tiger staring at her in the TARDIS shower—but she really wasn’t really in a screaming mood. And, anyway, she at least knew where the sound was coming from.

The screaming was throaty, unearthly, and in harmony coming as it did from multiple sources. And somehow, despite the thin atmosphere, there was even an echo. 

Clara hadn’t counted exactly how many screaming rubber chickens were actually in that bag she’d taken from the sixth Doctor’s TARDIS, but the Cybermen must have managed to step on every last one of them. Bless.

Several Cybermen commanded in unison, “DEFEND! DEFEND!” The distraction would only last a few seconds—Cybermen were evil, they weren’t stupid—but it would slow them down enough for Clara and the Doctor to increase their lead.

“You know, I paid good money for those,” the Doctor said, utterly failing to hide a grin as they continued towards the TARDIS.

“Um, why, exactly do you have a storage room in the TARDIS packed to the ceiling with bags of screaming rubber chickens?”

The Doctor stopped and looked down at his companion, almost affronted that the young woman could possibly miss something so obvious. “Clara! You know why.”

“ _UNIT Christmas Party_!” they said in unison, before starting to move again.

“You know, at Coal Hill, all the teachers get at Christmas is a slice of fruit cake and a Starbucks gift card,” Clara mumbled.

“We could always invite your lot over next-”

“NO! The thought of Armitage and Benton in the same room fills me with dread.”

“Och! They’d get along fine. Peas in a pod.”

 _Hey, this is good_ , Clara thought. _As long as he’s bantering, he’s not regenerating._

“Hey, this is good. As long as I’m bantering, I’m not regenerating,” the Doctor said.

“Get out of my head, Doctor.”

“You get out of mine first.”

“Never.”

Finally, they reached the TARDIS. Clara unlocked the door and helped the Doctor inside. 

“We have to take off, now,” the Doctor said as he staggered into the console room, nearly tripping on the ramp. 

“Fix you first. Fly you later,” Clara said. The Doctor cocked an eyebrow. “You know what I mean!” She raised her head and started speaking to the air around her. “And it would help if the sickbay was a little closer, by the way.” She wasn’t looking forward to half-carrying the Doctor another fifty or a hundred metres or a thousand metres (depending on the ship’s mood).

Fortunately, the TARDIS took the not-so-subtle hint and the entrance to the sickbay formed around the exit of the console room. The gleaming white bed looked so tempting.

“I’m not sharing,” the Doctor muttered as Clara helped him lie down on it. “No, sir. Serious internal injuries make me greedy. You go find your own bed.”

“Shush, now,” Clara said as she gingerly unwrapped the bandage, sucking air through her teeth as she saw, in the bright light of the sickbay, how serious things really were.

“My bellybutton better still be there,” the Doctor said, looking at the ceiling. “After all the trouble I went through installing it so you’d get off my case about not having one.”

“Your bellybutton is fine. The rest … Doctor, I don’t know what to do next ... No, Doctor, don’t pass out on me now!”

The Doctor forced his eyes to open. The effect of the adrenaline and the medicine from the bandage was fading fast. 

“How’s your medical training?” he asked.

“I know how to dial 999.”

The Doctor glared, albeit weakly. “No time for jokes, Clara.”

“St. John’s first-aid course. We all had to take it at the school. But this is a bit more serious than a cut or broken arm, Doctor.”

The Doctor reached up and held Clara’s arm, making eye contact. “I trust you.”

“To do what, Doctor?”

“I’ve got internal bleeding. I need you to stop it. If you can do that, I might be able to apply some regeneration energy to fix it.”

“Regeneration?”

“I don’t plan on changing my face. Don’t you worry.” Suddenly, he started to sing. “ _I’ve grown accustomed to my face..._ ”

Clara failed to find that funny. “Doctor, I’m scared. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ve had food poisoning. Trust me, you can’t do any worse. I’ll guide you.”

With a sad smile, Clara nodded. “So, what do I do first?”

“See that white bag hanging on the hook over there? Go get it. It has the supplies you need to get started. Friend of mine put it together in case something like this ever happened ... again.”

Clara headed to the far wall where a gleaming satchel was hanging. Scrawled in magic marker on the side were the cheeky words, “Sarah Jane Smith’s All-in-One Amateur Time Lord Surgery Kit.” She grabbed the bag and returned to the Doctor’s side.

“OK, step one done. What’s next, Doctor?”

There was no reply.

“Doctor?”

Clara realised the Doctor was unconscious. “Oh no, no, no, no, no! Wake up, Doctor!”

She took his hand, and realised it was glowing faintly.

“Oh, no you don’t!” She squeezed his hand, hard, intentionally allowing her nails to dig into his palm, trying to get a response. The glow seemed to dissipate slightly. Did that mean he was fighting it? Or dying? She slapped his face, not caring if doing so would upset him. This time, there was no response.

Clara quickly paced back and forth, her mind racing. She’d learned a lot during her time with the Doctor, but surgery was something she knew nothing about—especially on an individual with two hearts and who knows what other anatomical differences. She could do more harm than good. She could even kill him. The thought of that possibility was unbearable.

The Doctor told her once that sometimes the only choices available were bad ones. She made herself ask the question: what if she let him change? He’d be a different man when he came out the other side, and no longer the man she’d come to love. That man would be dead. But maybe they could start over, like they did before. He was in his TARDIS now, safe, secure; that regenloop he was worried about might not happen. He would understand. Sometimes the toughest choice was to do absolutely nothing.

She looked closely at the Doctor’s face. She loved every line, every wild stray hair on his head, the eyebrows that comforted her as much as they terrified others. Unacceptable, she thought. He could not change. He would not change. She would not sit on her hands and do nothing. There had to be another option. 

And then she realised—with a grin so wide, the Cheshire Cat might as well have retired like some Christmas pantomime wannabe—that there _was_ another option.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t blow up the universe.

**Next episode: A Roll of the Dice...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you desiring audio to go with my description of the screaming rubber chicken attack, here you go: [I advise against wearing headphones while listening to this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBxcfkkS-Nc)


	8. A Roll of the Dice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With the Doctor unconscious in the TARDIS sickbay, possibly even dying, Clara has to turn to the only person she knows in the universe right now who might be able to save him...

“Do you mind if I take a couple of photos of your coat before we proceed? For reference purposes?”

Osgood stood awkwardly in front of the sixth Doctor and Peri, fiddling with the small DSLR in her hand.

“Reference purposes? _Reference purposes?_ ” the Doctor demanded. “For what reason, might I ask?”

“Uh, well, there are so many of you, it never hurts to have as much information as possible about things like your mode of dress, etc.” 

Peri laughed. “Please don’t tell me there are more of him that dress this way.” She jabbed a thumb at the Doctor’s multicoloured coat. He gave her a disdainful look.

“No, but … all of the photos of you we have on file are in … black and white,” Osgood lied. Badly.

“Try again,” said the Doctor.

Osgood gave up. “Oh, alright then. I’m a huge fan of yours and I have a complete wardrobe based upon your outfits that I share with my, er, twin sister, except for this one. So, when I realised my friend had summoned you, I figured I’d take the liberty. But you were supposed to be asleep. And I somehow just made everything sound even more awkward, so I will just shut up now.”

Peri gave the Doctor an odd look. “ _Another_ one, Doctor? I swear, you have more groupies than Rod Stewart.”

The Doctor opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the familiar wheezing, groaning sound of the TARDIS returning. “Saved by the dematerialision circuit. I assume this means ‘Courtney’ got the job done,” he said, air-quoting the name.

As the TARDIS materialised, it was Peri who first noticed something was off. “Doctor, I don’t think that’s our TARDIS.” It had a St. John Ambulance logo on the door, something the Doctor hadn’t had on his ship in centuries. And the colour was wrong. And the windows were the wrong size.

“Oh, no. This had better not be another me,” he growled. “I hate class reunions.”

The door opened and Clara came running out, grabbing the Doctor by the arm and pulling him towards the TARDIS. “I need you. My TARDIS has your TARDIS in a holding pattern in the Vortex. My Doctor is inside and he might regenerate but he’s got too much internal damage for that to be a certainty and he was going to talk me through surgery but then he passed out.” She paused for breath. “I need your help to save him.”

The Doctor pulled up short before going inside. “You’re playing Russian Roulette with the universe, young lady, bringing me in there.”

“I don’t care. Are you going to help me save him? Everything has gone pear-shaped and I would really rather it be you helping me than Mi-er-the Master.”

“You very well know there’s only one answer. Come along, Peri. Looks like we’re getting a preview of the future.”

Forgotten in the commotion as everyone else bundled into the TARDIS, Osgood looked on with bemusement. 

“I’ll just wait out here, shall I?” she said to no one.

***

“I seem to be destined to become a bookworm in my old age,” the Doctor noted as Clara led him and Peri through her Doctor’s console room. Something on the mezzanine caught his eye. “I don’t believe it! I found my favourite chair! I can’t wait to remember where I lost it.”

“I like the lighting in here better. Sometimes our TARDIS makes my eyes hurt,” Peri muttered.

The sickbay was still in its new location, a fact the Doctor chose not to comment upon. Inside, the future Doctor lay as still as a corpse, and Clara prayed that he was still breathing—and had the same face. Both conditions still applied, to her relief.

Clara put her hand on her Doctor’s cheek and stroked it with her thumb. “I’m here, Doctor. Don’t you worry. We’ll fix this.” She gave his forehead a light kiss.

Choosing to ignore this, the sixth Doctor instead gazed down at his future incarnation. “Reminds me a little of The Nose. Without the nose, but with added eyebrows,” he said. Clara glared at him. “I wasn’t being insulting. I rather liked The Nose. The comparison is a compliment.” He handed his coat to Peri (who proceeded to drop it on the floor behind her) and leaned in to scan the other Doctor’s wounds with his sonic screwdriver. He sucked air in through his teeth, much as Clara had done earlier. “Nasty. Looks like a crush wound.”

Clara nodded. “But can you fix him?” 

“Won’t know until I try,” the Doctor said as he started to wash his hands in the nearby sink. “Hopefully, you won’t be the first to witness a Time Lord killing himself off, though I half-expect the Master will manage that trick one of these days.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Clara asked. 

“And what about me?” Peri interjected.

“Courtney, with no offence intended, I know Peri more than I do you and we’ve built up a … rapport. I’m going to ask her to be my assistant for this, my nurse if you will, even though she owes me dry cleaning for what she did to my coat just now. Wash up, Peri, I’m going to need you to pass me the instruments as I need them.”

As Peri prepared, Clara said, “No offence taken at all, Doctor. I know how close you two were— _are!_ Are.” The Doctor smiled at that. “But I have to do something. Just sitting here isn’t my style, nor is pacing back and forth out in the hall.”

“I want you to monitor his vital signs and tell me the moment they go in either direction. Can you use one of these, too?” He handed her his sonic screwdriver and she nodded. She’d have preferred to use her Doctor’s sonic specs, but now wasn’t the time to confuse the timeline further; those she knew for certain were a recent invention. “The very instant you see a change, you tell me. That job is vital, but even more vital is what you’re doing right now. Even though I’m … he’s unconscious, he knows you’re with him. And that’s giving me … him … strength.”

“How do you know?”

“My dear Court … oh, bother, what is your real name, my dear? You don’t look like a Courtney.”

“Clara.”

The Doctor started to arrange surgical instruments on a small, cloth-draped table alongside the bed, he gestured at the other Doctor with a pair of forceps. “My dear Clara, looking at this injury, if he wasn’t drawing strength from you being here, he’d have already … well, this story would have a much different ending.”

Peri took her place by the Doctor’s side and handed out surgical masks to him and Clara. 

The sixth Doctor leaned over the twelfth and placed his hand on the prone man’s forehead. He squeezed his eyes tight in concentration for a few moments, then nodded, satisfied, and removed his hand.

“Anaesthesia is too risky for this sort of thing, so I just gave him a little bit of mental help to block off pain receptors,” he explained. Clara gave him an odd glance. “Don’t worry, my dear; I didn’t get nosy. Though you might find your next birthday present quite ... illuminating.” 

Adopting the air of a Prydonian Dr. Kildare (though Clara was also uncomfortably reminded of a scene in a Marx Brothers film she saw once), the Doctor pronounced: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” took a scalpel from the assortment of tools, and made the first incision.

**Next episode: A Delicate Operation...**


	9. A Delicate Operation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clara has recruited the sixth Doctor to save his future self. But will even his skills be enough?

At this point, one might assume that having the sixth incarnation of a brilliant Time Lord performing surgery on his future self would be a relatively straightforward affair to recount. After all, the Doctor was, even by his people’s standards, a genius; the man knew Time Lord anatomy as well as anyone else in the universe; and, well, we did mention the genius part, right?

Maybe if this was a TV show with five minutes to go before the closing credits, this might be the case. Magic surgery, a eureka moment, and the patient waking up instantly with a smile. In truth, it was damn hard work for the Doctor, not only cutting into someone who was technically himself, but dealing with the damage found therein. 

The Doctor came close to losing his older self on several occasions, changing tactics with his surgery as Clara called out the heart rate. Each time, Clara found herself praying that she wouldn’t be left alone. He couldn’t leave her; she had made him promise that, if he truly loved her, he’d come back. True, he had made that promise when he was conscious, but Clara still held him to it, even now. It was a forever promise, as far as she was concerned. And she had told him so, too. One small mercy: the decision to stop one of his hearts ended up being a benefit, as a functioning dual-cardiovascular system made internal medicine notoriously more dangerous. The sixth Doctor outright told her this at one point.

As she watched the other Doctor, Clara knew there was no way she could have performed the surgery herself, even if her Doctor had been conscious to guide her. She watched, she listened, she learned during every second she was with the Doctor, of that there was no mistake. She had even learned the basics of flying a TARDIS. But that had been fun; his hands gently guiding hers across the console, a reassuring squeeze of her shoulders when she successfully learned a new technique ... physical contact that she wished had gone on for just a few seconds longer ... yes, it had been fun. But this was different. This was not something one picked up on Wednesday-night adventures. There was only so much time and this was, after all, a man who measured his life experience in centuries. Clara had long since lost track of her exact age, and sometimes she indeed felt a few hundred years old (like today; when _had_ she last slept, anyway?), but she knew he had the edge on her in this department.

Minutes turned to half hours that turned to hours. No one took a break. The sixth Doctor’s hands moved faster than Clara had ever seen anyone’s move, tying off one blood vessel moments after using a tool to cauterise another. It was hypnotic; which, for Clara, was a good thing as it kept the fear out of her heart as she realised that, with only one small miscalculation on the surgeon’s part, her Doctor could be gone. It didn’t help matters any when the earlier Doctor made muttered reference to passing a “point of no return,” where regeneration would have resulted in a very short life expectancy for the next Doctor, if he changed at all. Bizarrely, in the middle of all this, the Doctor insisted on Clara recounting to him the events on Quijote, which she did in-between calling out changes in heart rate.

Peri, meanwhile … it was if a switch had been thrown with her. Gone was the irreverent, somewhat breezy young woman who had arrived in the Black Archive and who, not that long ago, had petulantly dropped her Doctor’s coat on the floor rather than acting as a valet for him. But now her Doctor was relying on her to pass him the correct surgical instruments, to keep him on track. Clara knew Peri’s background was botany, but now she acted like ... no, she _was_ ... his trusted nurse. His companion. For a moment, she felt a twinge as she remembered that she wasn’t unique. She tried to be, of course. And, in many ways, she knew she was ( _All those companions who have splintered their souls into countless echoes through time and space, please raise your hand? Just me, then?_ ). Still, Clara wondered how many other people the Doctor had transformed. Today, a giggly college student or swinging sixties bartender whose biggest priority in life was the next Beatles record release; tomorrow, a seasoned adventurer, ready to take on the world and often being called upon to help save it at the same time. 

It was no wonder that Clara knew in her heart—had known for quite some time, since she finally said goodbye to Danny and was given a second chance to be with the Doctor—that, if he ever asked her, she’d stay with him forever. She knew she could never let this life go. And then with her feelings for him factored in…

Well, this was an enlightened age, supposedly, and one of her past echoes, Queen Victoria, had famously proposed marriage to her suitor Prince Albert a couple of centuries before. Maybe, once he survived this, she’d just find a quiet planet, maybe a garden world, and steal Her Majesty’s idea.

Clara snapped out of her fantasy as the floor beneath her began to shake. It was enough to rattle the instruments on the table, cause the Doctor to drop his scalpel, and give Clara bit of queasiness, but it was over before it could do much more damage. “What the hell was that? London isn’t known for its earthquakes,” she said.

“Probably more of a timequake,” the sixth Doctor said, even though his attention never wavered from the surgery. “Means Time is getting wise to this little party we are throwing. Upset at not being invited, maybe?”

Peri handed the Doctor a fresh scalpel and asked, “I don’t get it, Doctor. We met that other you and Jamie in Spain and I don’t remember any earth-er-timequakes.”

“When I meet myself, it’s usually because the Time Lords have something to do with it, directly or indirectly, which is what happened in Spain ... hand me that gauze, please ... When we meet in an unsanctioned fashion, it’s what gamblers might call a ‘crap shoot.’ Time might ignore us, or we might not be together long enough for it to really matter. But, as I don’t recall ever performing life-or-death surgery on one of my later selves before, I think this scenario is unusual enough to get Time’s attention. Which means I need to finish this quickly.”

With that, the Doctor stopped talking and concentrated more than ever before on his patient, ignoring several more small timequakes (or “time tremors,” as Peri suggested by way of trying to make things sound a little less dire).

Maybe it was because Clara was so in tune with her Doctor, so simpatico—the reason their psychic paper instant-messaging system worked so well—that she actually _felt_ the moment the operation turned a corner. Something in her Doctor’s breathing, and then a subtle—almost imperceptible—squeezing of her hand; even out cold, and under whatever whammy his sixth version had given him, he still knew she was by his side. The surgeon-Doctor’s pronouncing, moments later, that the operation had been a success felt utterly superfluous. Taking the sonic from Clara, he set it to maximum and aimed it at his patient’s chest before activating it. Clara could almost hear the Doctor’s second heart starting to beat again.

“So, what now?” Peri asked, rubbing her neck. 

“Well, that’s up to him,” the Doctor said as he closed up the incision and wrapped healing bandages around it. “I’ve stuck my finger in the hole to stop the water from leaking out, but it’s up to him to fix the cracks before the dam bursts and floods the valley entirely.”

“Is there any way we can wake him?” Clara asked, just as another time tremor rattled the sickbay.

“Doubtful.” The Doctor closed his eyes in concentration for a moment. “He’s in a self-induced coma now. Similar to what sometimes happens to me after regeneration. Have you seen this yourself, Clara?”

“Actually,” she replied, “my Doctor didn’t see the point in sleeping at all after he changed. We had to knock him out ourselves.”

Peri yawned. “Can somebody do that for me? I’m exhausted.”

“Truth be told, so am I,” the earlier Doctor said. “With the First Law of Time already torn asunder, I can’t see what additional harm there might be in locating the future kitchen and having ourselves a future cup of future tea. Putting some distance between me and him might also reduce the shaking a little.”

“Doctor, thank you,” Clara said. “I’m not going to apologise for what I did, but I hope I haven’t caused a lot of trouble by calling you in like this. Twice. It would be a bit embarrassing if this caused a hole in the universe the size of Burkina Faso or something.”

“Burkina what?” Peri asked.

“Upper Volta in your time. Well, we’re still breathing TARDIS air and haven’t been cast into the Void. I think that’s a good sign,” the Doctor said. He nodded towards the exit. “As my American friends like to say, ‘let’s go raid the ice box.’”

“American friends from, like, thirty years ago,” Peri scoffed as she headed for the galley.

“I’m sorry. You go on. I don’t want to leave him,” Clara said, stroking her Doctor’s hair, protectively. “He knows I’m here; you said so yourself.”

The other Doctor smiled, sympathetically. “There is nothing you can do for him. He’s out of immediate danger, but he needs time. You’ve crossed the universe, rubber-chickened a troop of Cybermen—how I wish I could have seen that—taught a full day of classes, and had the honour of meeting me, of course, and I bet you haven’t had a thing to drink or eat since breakfast. You getting overtired and dehydrated is not going to help him, and he wouldn’t want to see that happen. And _I_ don’t want to see that happen. Come along, Clara. Let him rest. You have literally done everything possible within your power.”

“But…”

“Let me show you something.” The Doctor lifted away some of the healing bandages he’d placed over the incision, which, despite all the theatrics of earlier, ended up being no bigger than an appendectomy scar. Clara saw the skin pulsating with a warm glow. _That_ warm glow.

“He’s regenerating,” she said, dully.

“But only where it’s needed, like I told you,” the Doctor said. “Trust me. Right now he's doing my damnedest to heal himself. And there is nothing any of us can do to help. We’ve done all we can do. Now it’s up to him. And I can tell you right now he is _not_ fighting to come back in order to see my handsome face or line up for another go at the Daleks.”

***

Despite the sixth Doctor’s pronouncement that he needed tea, and his stated confidence in his later self’s ability to recover from the operation, he ended up just looking at the steaming cup without any interest in actually putting it to his lips. Same for Peri. Same for Clara. They hadn’t realized how tired they all were until they sat down.

The Doctor let out a huge yawn. “I don’t suppose you know how I regenerate into Number Seven?” he asked Clara. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I changed right now because I got so knackered today.”

Clara gave a small smile. “I actually don’t know how it happens, sorry.” She was too tired to care that he was being rhetorical, or, for that matter, to lie; the cause of the sixth Doctor's regeneration, for some reason, _was_ somewhat clouded in mystery. Once, her Doctor had joked that Six had simply hit his head falling off an exercise bike; at other time, he hinted at something more profound happening to his earlier incarnation. And the fact she was even thinking about this instead of thinking about her Doctor getting better quickly turned her smile into a frown.

Peri put her hand on Clara’s. “He’s going to be alright, Clara. I know it.”

Clara smiled back. “Normally, I rely on blind faith that the Doctor will save _me_. Or that he’ll work his way out of impossible situations with some brilliant plan. This time, though…”

“This time, the brilliant plan was all _yours_ , Clara,” the other Doctor said. “It’s something I would have done.”

“But I’ve put the universe at risk.”

“Great risk is often necessary for great rewards, my dear.”

“But will the reward be worth it?” Clara asked. “If my Doctor … is no longer my Doctor. What then?”

The sixth Doctor didn’t reply. Instead, for some reason, he just smiled at her. Oddly, so did Peri. And then their eyes looked past her.

“What?” Clara asked, puzzled.

She felt a warm, strong hand squeeze her shoulder gently. Reaching up without hesitation, she took the hand in hers, spun around in her chair, and gave her Doctor the most awkward—and most joyful—hug in the universe.

**Next episode: A Hearts to Hearts Conversation...**


	10. A Hearts to Hearts Conversation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The operation to save the twelfth Doctor's life a success, he and his earlier self now have to do something about the timequakes.

It had taken the twelfth Doctor an embarrassingly long (well, for him) time to extricate himself from Clara’s embrace. Following a quick round of greetings with his earlier self and Peri, another timequake/time tremor shook the TARDIS. The two Doctors instantly agreed that something had to be done about them. The solution actually came from Peri, who had innocently asked if having two copies of the same TARDIS in relatively close proximity to each other might be useful. 

By communicating with the other TARDIS (during which both Twelve and Six took time out to praise Clara for being able to remotely park the other ship in the Vortex in the first place, something she modestly gave the modern-day TARDIS credit for suggesting), the two Time Lords worked out a system wherein the two TARDISes would continually communicate back and forth; talking about the weather, gossiping about the Doctor, it didn’t matter, just so long as it confused Time enough to it could no longer draw a bead on where the two Doctors were in close proximity. It seemed to work, as the timequakes subsided almost instantly.

***

“I don’t know whether to scold you or give you a medal,” the twelfth Doctor said to Clara as they relaxed with their guests in the console room. Now that the timequake danger was averted, he had insisted that his earlier self and Peri, not to mention Clara, take a little down time to decompress after the operation. The mind wipe would come soon enough. Not surprisingly, the sixth Doctor was more interested in reacquainting himself with his favourite reading chair than catching up. Right now, he seemed to be stuck in an endless loop of nostalgia over the experience of sitting in it again and was gleefully relating it all to Peri, who seemed to alternate between rapt attention and standing-up catnaps. He could relate to the latter. The TARDIS materialised a Georgian-style chaise lounge for him to rest on, and he was stretched out on it, with Clara sitting alongside.

He continued his semi-good-natured haranguing. “Calling in one of my earlier selves, causing timequakes, and right now do you know there’s a hole in time and space the size of …” he did the calculations in his head, “Burkina Faso out by Saturn?”

“That was an astoundingly good guess, my dear,” the earlier Doctor called out from across the room.

“Thank you! I’m glad at least _one_ of you knows how to show gratitude,” Clara bantered back.

“Who says I’m not grateful?” her Doctor said. “I think it was brilliant. And impossible. Just your style, Clara.”

“I didn’t want to lose you,” she said, simply.

“One of these days, that might happen.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?” Clara said, allowing a little bit of anger to creep into her voice. For a two thousand-year-old man, the Doctor could be so damned naïve sometimes, not to mention coming back from death’s door was not the best time to bring this topic up again.

“Nothing is forever.”

“Do you think I don’t realise that?”

The Doctor took Clara’s hand. Or tried to; she pulled away at first. But then she relented and he grasped it gently, his thumb tracing her knuckle. “I don’t mean it that way, Clara.” He motioned to where Peri was sitting on the armrest of the reading chair her Doctor occupied and lowered his voice to prevent it carrying beyond Clara. “I don’t think Peri ever had plans to leave me, either, and I was content for her to stay. Then we went on one adventure too many.”

“You’re worried that might happen with us?” Clara whispered.

“You just don’t get it, either,” the Doctor echoed back, loud enough for the guests to turn their head in his direct. “I’ve lived in fear of losing you ever since that-” He lowered his voice again. “Ever since Missy put you inside that Dalek and I nearly killed you.”

Clara looked down at their clasped hands, and then up into the Doctor’s eyes. “And what made that moment any different than the zillion other times I’d been in harm’s way? The Cybermen could have killed me twice. The Teller came within seconds of turning my brain into soup and ruining my hairline. Not to mention there was never any guarantee that I’d have come back after creating all those echoes.”

“I don’t know … it just … it was like a switch being flipped. It was like those times happened to someone else. Because now I was holding a gun on a Dalek at point-blank range, willing to pull the trigger because I thought it had killed you. You can’t imagine the emptiness I was feeling at that moment. And the joy when I realized you were still alive.”

Clara lifted the Doctor’s hand until it rested against her cheek. “I know exactly how you feel. That’s why I took the risk.”

The Doctor smiled. “Aren’t we a pair?”

“Heaven help the universe. But, speaking of a pair, we have a pair of houseguests to take care of and Osgood is—oh, no! In all the panic, I forgot all about her. She must be bored to tears out there by now,” Clara said, standing up.

“Don’t you worry. I’ll take us back to just after you left with What’s-His-Face. She’ll barely notice we were gone and, even better, she’ll not have experienced any timequakes yet. What’s another bending of the First Law?” The Doctor started to get up, intending to go to the console, but a twinge of pain stopped him.

“Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ve got this,” Clara said.

“Keep this up, you’re going to want a TARDIS of your own.”

“Know where we can steal any?”

“Come to think of it…”

The banter was interrupted by the arrival of a smiling sixth Doctor and Peri, who were themselves holding hands.

“Well, much as I’ve enjoyed the experience, I do fear the UNIT mind wipe can’t be put off any longer,” the earlier Doctor said.

“Wait a minute, Doctor, I thought you said we would lose all memory of meeting a future you,” Peri protested. “Earlier, it was just Clara we’d met, but now we’ve met him ourselves, shouldn’t that be enough?”

Clara’s Doctor replied: “You might lose the broad strokes, but some finer details, like Clara’s name, or general knowledge might stick and we can’t take that risk. Especially regarding Clara.”

“What’s wrong with Clara?” Peri asked.

“Oh, so many things,” Twelve said, ignoring his companion sticking her tongue out at him. “Just trust me … there are reasons. Don’t worry; you won’t feel a thing with the mind wipe. Just ask Clara.”

“Just ask me what?” The Doctor just smiled at her. “OK,” Clara said, “you and I are going to have a chat later about uninvited mind wipes.”

The sixth Doctor cleared his throat. “Peri, Clara, could you give us a few moments?”

Twelve instructed Clara: “Go ahead and shift the TARDIS. Make it for about an hour after you picked these two up.” 

The companions complied, leaving the Doctors alone.

“Help me up and let’s go for a walk,” said Twelve. “We have a few minutes, the TARDISes are keeping further timequakes at bay, and I’m getting a cramp. I need to keep the circulation going to help the regeneration energy complete its repair job.”

***

“Well, as reunion parties go, this was definitely one of the stranger ones, eh?” Six said once they entered the corridor and were safely out of earshot of their companions.

“Oh, trust me, there are weirder ones to come,” said Twelve.

“Still hate pears, then?”

Twelve just made a grimace. “Almost as much as carrot juice.”

Six shuddered at the thought. “So you’re not one of the Thirteen, I take it. I have the same sense about you that I have when I see the Master. In a good way, though.”

“Well, I count myself as the twelfth, but technically, yeah, I’m a bit further along.”

“I’m not going to ask how, but I get the sense that young lady had something to do with it,” Six said. “Just as I am certain I have met her before. No use asking if you know why, eh?”

“Reasons,” Twelve repeated.

“Fair enough. But I did ask her if you two were … you know, but she wouldn’t tell me. So, are you, you know...?” He pointed at the ring his later self wore.

Twelve smiled, wigging his fingers. “The TARDIS gifted it to me. Maybe it’s her way of saying companions come and go. But Clara and me, we’re ... since when have you ever been a romantic? If you’re post-Dastari and the Sontarans, you never even realised that Peri was in love with you until recently.”

Six looked sad at this. “I guess this is proof that that not every memory and emotion survives regenerations. I’ve known since Androzani. But I also know nothing is forever. That’s why I keep my distance. I have to. Someday, I might be forced to break her heart like I did Sarah-Jane’s. Or she’ll break mine, like Jo, Nyssa and Romana did. I can face off against Davros and the Master any time you like. But losing someone that I … I just can’t allow those feelings to consume me. So I don’t. I get the impression this lesson no longer applies to you, though.”

By this time, the two had reached the library. Twelve stopped and dropped himself into a reading chair. He gestured to a second one and Six sat down, too.

“Oh, no, it still very much applies,” Twelve said. “And I tried, especially after this last change. I thought it would be easy. My last self didn’t follow the rules and fell head over heels for Clara, despite having just learned a hard lesson in why this was a bad idea. And I know Clara felt the same, especially after she got caught in the planetary equivalent of a lie detector and said a few things ... including a few things I don’t think she thought I heard.” He smiled at that memory. “But the last me looked young—younger even than Celery Man, if you can believe it. He made a good match for Clara. When I ended up looking like this, I was reminded of the Curse of the Time Lords; I’ll just keep changing, but it’s a long path she can never follow me on. I thought she didn’t look at me in _that_ way anymore. Plus, I knew that ageism is as bad in Clara’s era as it ever was; mixing grey and brown is considered a sin by many, especially on Earth in the early twenty-first century. Someone who looks so old, being with someone who looks so young? The names you get called...” He ended with a scoff.

“I keep hoping this planet grows up, but I am continually disappointed,” Six sighed. Through all of this, he had reigned in his own talkative nature. He knew himself well, and he knew this version of him needed to talk to somebody.

Twelve nodded at Six's remark. “So I let Clara go … at least, in _that_ way, I did. Tried to put her in the same category as, oh, Vicki or Polly. And, of course, she soon found somebody else. A soldier man. Young. Appropriate. No funny looks from people and whispered remarks when _they_ held hands. And she seemed happy.”

“It’s never a good feeling, is it,” Six said. “It’s been centuries and it still hurts to remember when Jo decided to marry that Jones fellow. She was the first human in centuries that I’d allowed myself to fall for, but it was never meant to be. And I did you one better, remember—my hair was _white_ as a South Pole summer and she was barely in her twenties, as I recall.”

Twelve smiled. “Jo still hurts and it’s been millennia—yeah, not centuries; I’ve been around a while. But with Clara it was worse. I had been through … I better not give you to much information on this, even with a mind wipe coming, so I’ll just say ‘Spoilers’ and leave it at that. After, Clara was there for me, never judging, always what I needed. Perfect. So it wasn’t long after I turned her away, in _that_ way, that I realized I couldn’t let her go. I actually found myself running interference in her love life, placing myself above Danny as much as possible. I orchestrated entire adventures to show him up—even a bank robbery. Don’t ask. And it seemed to work. Clara began lying in order to stay with me and stay with Danny, too. Didn’t end well, though. Danny died.”

Six didn’t expect that, “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t my fault, though I have a suspicion I know who did it and I can never tell Clara. Just another secret, I suppose. I tried to make it right, but of course that was impossible. Danny was gone, but Clara and I became closer after that. She and I shared a dream where Danny’s soul, if you want to call it that, told her to let him go, to find somebody else. And I think she chose me. I brought this up with her, you know—the ageism thing. The funny looks. And you want to know her response?”

“Methinks you will tell me regardless.”

“Youthinks correctly,” Twelve said. “She looked me in the eye and said, and I slightly paraphrase, ‘Screw them.’ And the very next trip we took, we ended up in Victorian Scotland, and she gleefully introduced me around as her husband. The joke was on her, though, because it was 1850 and no one cared about age gaps back then!”

The two shared a brotherly laugh. But Six’s laugh subsided when he saw darkness cross his future self’s eyes.

“But then something happened a little while ago … something bad ... and ever since I’ve been fixated on what it might feel like if I ever lost her. Not if she found another Danny, or told me to go to hell again because I pushed her too far. I mean, what if she ever…” Twelve took a deep breath. “I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore.”

“Anticipatory grief. That’s not part of the Curse of the Time Lords. It’s part of the Curse of Caring,” said Six. “And, from what I have seen, your companion has it just as bad as you do.”

“I said I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Yes, you do. But, just as you did with the age thing, you need to talk this through with her. Otherwise, it will all just keep building up inside you.”

“I’ve tried. I’ve written whole speeches, pages and pages of what I want to say. Hell, I even got Keats to ghost-write a poem for me to memorize. But, whenever the opportunity arrives, either I clam up or all that comes out is blather about me having a ‘duty of care,’ which annoys the hell out of her and probably just makes her think that I’m trying to be a surrogate father to her or something. Hell, didn’t you hear the two of us a few minutes ago? We only get so far and then either one of us changes the subject, or I play the duty of care card and she gets angry with me.”

“Trust me, Doctor, I may have a few centuries less mileage than you do, but I watched her during the operation and spoke to her before. Believe me, she does _not_ see you as a father figure. And she doesn't need poetry. And if you don’t think she feels the same worry about losing you, she just crossed half the galaxy _and_ risked the safety of said galaxy, to save you. Yes, I overheard the two of you. This duty of care you talk about, it goes both ways.”

“I wonder what Clara and Peri are talking about right now?” Twelve pondered, before a mischievous look came over his face. “Wanna go eavesdrop?”

“Knowing those two, they are probably comparing notes on best practices for driving handsome Time Lords insane. Speaking of Time Lords and insane, I assume The Master is still a headache for you. And the Rani?”

“You could say we have the worst of both worlds these days.” Another change of topic. “It’s great seeing Peri again.”

“We’ve had some rough patches after I changed, as you no doubt recall. Very rough patches. But she’s been amazing. No details, obviously, but does she do alright, uh… later?”

Twelve frowned. Thanks to Time Lord interference during his second trial, Peri’s future was destined to be unsettled at best, with multiple possible futures for her, ranging from her becoming the consort of King Yrconos to becoming a famous talk show host in early twenty-first century Hollywood. And, among those, was a worst-case scenario he tried never to think about, a timeline in which her body was corrupted and stolen by the criminal Sil, who was quickly put down by an enraged Yrconos. “Her future is … complex,” was all he could muster by way of response.

“I was afraid of that. We better get back before Peri and Clara figure out a way to conquer all of time and space.”

***

Outside the TARDIS, they found Osgood pacing the chamber floor, nervously. “About bloody time,” she muttered, before beaming as she saw two Doctors emerge alongside Peri and Clara. “It worked!”

“I owe you an ice cream, Osgood,” the twelfth Doctor said, his arm around Clara’s shoulders, both for a bit of physical support and, well, after his hearts to hearts conversation with his earlier self, he just wanted to. She certainly was not complaining. “Even better, I have a spare, what do you call it Clara, ‘holey jumper’; would you like one for your collection?”

“Yes, please,” Osgood said as Clara ducked out from under the Doctor’s arm to give her a hug and a quiet thank you for her help, and to give her a brief update.

The sixth Doctor looked around the chamber. “Fascinating place,” he said. “I’d love to explore, but we have our own TARDIS circling the block in the Vortex waiting to pick us up, and, unfortunately, we do need that memory wipe.” Six put out a hand for Twelve to grasp, the two once again thankful that their unique circumstances prevented the energy discharge that usually occurred when two versions of the same person made physical contact. “As someone we both know once said, it’s reassuring to know that my future is in safe hands.”

“Why, thank-”

“I was talking about Clara.” With that, the sixth Doctor let go of the other Doctor and gave his future companion a hug that lifted her off the ground. 

“Now, _that_ is what I call a hug,” Clara said, slightly winded. “You take care of yourself.”

Peri tried to hug the twelfth Doctor at the same time, but he instinctively pulled back. “I’m not really a hugger anymore, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Doctor,” Clara said, sternly, “hug the lady, that’s an order.”

Twelve laughed. “Yes, boss.” He gave Peri her hug. “It was great to see you again, Peri. Take care of the big guy.” He leaned in to whisper: “Make sure he drinks lots of carrot juice. He’s not the kind to say it aloud, but he just loves the stuff.”

“Will do. Will I ever see you again?” Peri asked.

“Time will tell. It always does,” he said. “And you ... just be magnificent, as always.”

Osgood prepared to activate the mind wipe, tapping commands into a tablet to calibrate the device to only impact the sixth Doctor and Peri. She motioned to her Doctor and Clara. “You two better go so their TARDIS can come in,” she advised. “Swing by for drinks later with my sister?”

With smiles all around, the Doctor and Clara opened the door to their TARDIS and went inside. The door wasn’t even half-closed when Clara could be seen throwing her arms around him, her head buried in his shoulder and his chin nuzzling her hair. The Doctor and Clara Oswald. Together. In the TARDIS. It never got old. 

A few moments later, the ship faded away, leaving Osgood, the sixth Doctor and Peri alone and awaiting the arrival of the earlier version of the TARDIS.

“Lovely fellows, all of you,” Osgood said as she entered the code into her tablet that would finally activate the mind wipe on her two guests.

“A man is defined by the company he keeps,” the Doctor said as he took Peri’s hand and smiled down at her. “Now, Peri, about that trip to Blackp-”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed my first properly serialized story and thank you to everyone who commented and gave kudos. Now, a brief concordance:
> 
> Chapter 1:
> 
> My story series "Instant Messaging" describes in more detail why Twelve and Clara are able to communicate using psychic paper.
> 
> Planet Quijote is real. It was among the first cohorts of exoplanets to be assigned actual proper names.
> 
> The Jane Eyre-Rochester/Clara-Twelve similarity has been noted by a lot of people, and was incorporated into the Titan Comics story "Unearthly Things".
> 
> The reference to the "Doctor Who? Experience" is a nod to the now-concluded, but very popular exhibit that was located just down the street from the Roath Lock studio in Cardiff for several years.
> 
> Chapter 2:
> 
> The Eleventh Doctor's fondness for the word "plinth" comes from a comedy skit Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman recorded for the 2013 BAFTA Awards telecast. Twelve's inability to say the word is a nod to how Ten had trouble uttering Nine's catchphrase "Fantastic" in a deleted scene from "The Christmas Invasion."
> 
> Chapter 3:
> 
> I'm not the first to make a comparison between the Sixth Doctor and Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat; that was previously done in the Big Finish 50th anniversary audio drama, "The Light at the End."
> 
> Six's references to Blackpool tie in to the original ending of "Revelation of the Daleks" which was supposed to lead into the first episode of Season 23, "The Nightmare Fair" by having Six tell Peri they were going to Blackpool next. But when the original Season 23 was replaced by "Trial of a Time Lord," this was dropped and the Doctor's reference to Blackpool was removed.
> 
> Peri's outfit is meant to be the one she's seen wearing in "The Mysterious Planet", the first story of "Trial of a Time Lord."
> 
> The TARDIS lock description is a nod to the Paul McGann TV movie.
> 
> "Tiger in the bathroom" refers to the made-for-DVD minisode "Clara in the TARDIS".
> 
> Chapter 5: 
> 
> Comparisons between the Cybermen and The Borg have been going for decades so, yeah, I went there! I had Clara at 4 years old because Jenna Coleman was born in 1986, and so would have been about 4 when the "Best of Both Worlds" arc first aired on Star Trek TNG.
> 
> Treebeard is a tree-like creature in the Lord of the Rings books and movies. 
> 
> Regenloop is a term I made up for this story, but I'm sure the scenario I mentioned happened a lot during the Time War.
> 
> In this chapter and later I reference the numerous different fates for Peri suggested on TV and in literature and audio. These are expanded upon further in the Big Finish audio drama "Peri and the Piscon Paradox." The wrestling valet fate was from the epilogue of the novelisation of "Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp."
> 
> The mishap with the key is my way of suggesting why Twelve only has seven keys in "Dark Water".
> 
> Kroton is a "good Cyberman" who was featured in Doctor Who Magazine's comic strip years ago. 
> 
> Chapter 8:
> 
> The bellybutton reference relates to an earlier story of mine, "Navel-Gazing."
> 
> Chapter 9:
> 
> The cause of the Sixth Doctor's regeneration was kept a mystery for a long time. The exercise bike option stems from "Time and the Rani", but both Big Finish Audio and BBC Books later offered their own - somewhat more noble - causes for his change.
> 
> Chapter 10:
> 
> I'm aware that other media have given their own take on the origins of the Twelfth Doctor's ring. What you see here has always been my headcanon regarding that particular topic.
> 
> Ever since it was confirmed that the original script for "Dark Water" had Missy reveal herself as The Rani, not the Master (albeit as spoiler protection for on-location filming), I've wondered if the Rani wasn't another incarnation of the Master. 
> 
> Exactly 30 years before I really got into shipping Twelve and Clara, I was shipping Six and Peri. So I reflect a bit of that here. The Dastari incident refers to "The Two Doctors."
> 
> I won't keep people in suspense regarding who Twelve suspects was responsible for Danny's death. Ever since I first saw "Dark Water" in 2014 I have been of the opinion that Missy was driving the car that ran over Danny, seeing as it was otherwise too convenient for Twelve and Clara to stumble upon the whole Nethersphere business, especially given it was part of Missy's endgame.
> 
> The adventure in Victorian Scotland in 1850 is recounted in my story, Blessed.
> 
> The second trial refers to the events of 1986's "The Trial of a Time Lord", which included "Mindwarp", the storyline in which Peri made her tragic exit from the TARDIS. Once again, references are also made the audio drama "Peri and the Piscon Paradox". The cut-off sentence that ends this story is a nod to the final moment of "Revelation of the Daleks". Though this time I let Six at least the the first syllable of Blackpool out.


End file.
